Disk read error... Win2K boot issue...

[Budfred]

Howdy all,

I have another problem that I could use some help with... I took the hard drive out of a computer that I rebuilt for a friend and that subsequently crashed... I couldn't figure out what was wrong with that system, so I decided to switch the hard drive to an HP that is similar to the one the system that crashed and see if I could get it to work on the new system... I get a "Disk read error" each time I try to boot to it and am told to do Ctrl-Alt-Delete to reboot... I tried a Repair with the Win2K CD and even tried a repair from the install on the disk... It still gives me the "Disk read error"... It appears that the drive is being seen by the computer and Win2K is able to access it, but that I can't get the computer to boot to it... It is in NTFS, but I figured the Repair from the CD should have made that okay if there was any problem... If I have to I can install Win2K on another hard drive and copy over the files from this drive, wipe it and reinstall on it, but I would rather avoid that if I can... Does anyone have any ideas what I might be missing here??

Thanks for any ideas...

[MRGOLFER101]

I had the same problem with my PC. I soon relized that the floppy disk I had in the drive caused the computer to read DISK READ ERROR. To resolve this issue just remove the floopy disk out of the floppy drive and everything should come back to normal. This might be useful to you.

[Budfred]

I had the same problem with my PC. I soon relized that the floppy disk I had in the drive caused the computer to read DISK READ ERROR. To resolve this issue just remove the floopy disk out of the floppy drive and everything should come back to normal. This might be useful to you.
Welcome to http://www.pcguide.com/ubb/pcgubb.gif

I am very familiar with the floppy drive issue and that is not the problem here... There is no floppy in the drive...

An update:

I just tried to do a reinstall of Win2K over the current install and I am still getting "A disk read error occurred"...

When I hook up another hard drive, I don't get this message, but then it doesn't have anything installed on it yet... It looks like I am going to need to do the install on that drive and then redo the other drive... Any other ideas before I get to that??

[jlreich]

Well it would seem the boot files are not being found or they are incorrect. But the repair install should have taken care of that.

How was the drive setup on the old machine? Lone master, master w/ slave, slave? Double check that the jumper is set correctly.

Have you ran the diagnostics on the HDD?

[Paul Komski]

Check that the CMOS settings are correct and that the HDD is correctly recognised in the BIOS setup and try setting the BIOS to autodetect the HDD.

Then check that the correct partition has been marked as active (with Fdisk or BiNG) and that it reports back the correct type of file system.

[Budfred]

Thanks for all the suggestions... It was the only drive in the other system and it was partitioned into two drives... It seemed to be set up properly in CMOS and I did use Fdisk to set it as Active after the first few failed attempts to get into it... I ran Chkdsk on the hard drive and it found no problems... I had also just done a full detailed analysis of it a couple of weeks ago, so I think it is okay...

A little while ago I set up the extra drive as Master and installed Win2K... I then checked the unavailable drive as Slave and found that I had already wiped out most of any data my friend saved since she got the computer a couple of weeks ago, so I decided to repartition, reformat and reinstall... It just booted up into Win2K a little while ago... The second partition remains intact and contains her data from more than 2 weeks ago, so I can restore most of it for her...

Thanks again... :)