disk read error help

[Skie]

Ok so my gfs pc is having some troubles. When it starts up it goes to the alienware start up screen (back screen grey alien head) at this point i can hit f2/f12 to enter the start up bios. If i let it go past that it goes to a black screen and simply says:

Disk read Error please press CTRL + ALT + Delete to restart.

Any ideas?

[Skie]

Also it never makes it to the screen to choose to boot in safe mode

[Furtwangler]

If you go into the bios is your boot hard drive listed? check your connections/power cable to the drive.

[Skie]

when i hit F12 it ask me if i wanna load the cd or HD i choose HD, pauses a few sec then gives me same error

[nitsuj]

Ok so my gfs pc is having some troubles. When it starts up it goes to the alienware start up screen (back screen grey alien head) at this point i can hit f2/f12 to enter the start up bios. If i let it go past that it goes to a black screen and simply says:

Disk read Error please press CTRL + ALT + Delete to restart.

Any ideas?

Usually this means it can't find your harddrive.

Check your BIOS settings and see your boot priority. Normally it's:

- CDROM
- HDD

So that you can boot from a recovery CD or what not if present, otherwise boot your OS off the harddrive.

I'm assuming you have nothing in your CD drive so it's trying to load your OS off your harddrive and can't find it. Follow the previous suggestion and see if the harddrive is showing up in your BIOS (or when you boot up, in verbose mode, it should flash the RAM and then the disk devices it finds on your machine if you can read it fast). If not, then something is wrong.

Either a cable came loose or your harddrive has failed :/

[Skie]

OK got around to messing with it today. checked the boot priority and it had the USB ports and stuff listed but moved CD to #1, Hd to #1. Nada, Opened it up and pushed a little on the connectors to see if it helped anything. Nada. blew some of the dust off the memory sticks and Nada (was worth a shot) took out the HD and re-connected it. Nada. I also tried to boot it without the HD in it and it simply said "OS not found". anyway to test if the HD is fried?

[Zeith]

Download GParted

It's a livecd that will let you examine the size, health, filesystem, partition tables, so on of all your media. You can boot into this environment without making any changes to the hard disk. Depending on the BIOS, "disk read error" might mean that it's not able to read anything from the disk, in which case it won't show up in GParted at all, or it might mean that your BIOS didn't find a bootloader on any partition, which can be fixed with an OS disc, usually.

This gets a little tricky, but once you've booted into the livecd, you can open a terminal and issue the following commands to get a little bit more info:

sudo /bin/bash

dmesg | grep sd

You should see something like this come up:

dmesg:[    0.000000] Kernel command line: root=/dev/sda2 ro quiet
dmesg:[    4.946461] Driver 'sd' needs updating - please use bus_type methods
dmesg:[    4.946461] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 156312576 512-byte hardware sectors (80032 MB)
dmesg:[    4.946461] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
dmesg:[    4.946461] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
dmesg:[    4.946461] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

If you can see that, that'll let you know that the hard disk is (probably) operating normally, and that there's a problem with its bootloader.