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A Disk Read Error has Occured!

M

Mullzy

Senior member
I had an 80GB Maxtor as the lone HD in my Windows XP PC for about 6 months -- no problems. I recently added a 60GB Maxtor as a slave and initially had no problems.

Recently I started getting a "A Disk Read Error has Occured" message when rebooting, but only if the PC has been turned OFF. I can restart/reset with no problems, but if the PC has been turned off at all I get this error.

If I turn the PC on and off about 20 times it will finally boot up. Once it's booted I have zero problems using either drive. I basically don't shut my system down anymore -- It's been running solid for about a month now. I reboot it every 3-4 days just because but I never shut it down.

Any thoughts? Power supply problem possibly? I thought that perhaps I might be pushing the limits of my 300w power supply (2 HD's, 2 CD/DVD drivers, 1 AGP, 3 PCI cards).

I've run checkdisk/scandisk and found no problems. I think I'll got looking for a Maxtor diagnostic tool and see if it can find anything.

*shrug* Any help/direction would be appreciated.

cheers,
Mullzy
 
No I haven't. Maybe I'll switch some of my leads around and see if it makes a difference.

One thing I just remembered is that I had to replace my GF4 heatsink/fan with one which has a blue LED in it (only gf4 heatsink availble here in Edmonton). Power for it is chained in with one of my HD's. I'll try removing it.
 
* a couple weeks pass *

So I checked all my power/ide connections and didn't find any obvious problems. I took my GF4 LED power lead off of my HD and moved it to my CD-ROM. That seemed to work for a while (shut my PC down 4 or 5 times and started it up with no problems).

Then the other day I was having some soundcard problems so I shutdown and got my old friend the "A disk read error has occurred -- Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart". Once again I shut my pc off/on about 5 times and it started booting.

Interesting thing though... when it finally boots for the first time it takes about 10 minutes to get to the login screen. At first you see the black screen with the white bar progressing across the bottom (chkdsk isn't it?) and then the Windows XP startup screen appears for about 10 minutes while the HD light is on constantly.

I'm assuming it's just doing a chkdsk, but any suggestions on what else it might be doing? Is there any way to tell what diagnostics or processes are run by WindowsXP when it starts up like this. I thought it might be rolling back some drivers or something, reinstalling some lower level drivers... anything.

Thoughts?
 
you should check to make sure the jumpers on you HD are set to master & slave and not cable select or something like that.

You have no other errors? in windows?

That deffinitely seems like a long time to boot.

you can DL a Maxtor diagnostics utility at they're site www.maxtor.com

What are you other system specs?

Have you Defrag'd in a while?
 
how old of a power supply do you have?
are you hooked up to battery back-up?
do you have power surges / outages alot were you live ?
 
The maxtor powerdisk utility is actually really good at diagnosing drive problems. You may want to check it out before it gets worse.
 
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