"A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart." HELP ME PLEASES(!) :(

I have a problem that I was wondering whether anyone could help me with. : D

Here's the deal, I am a semi noob when it comes to computing in this sense and this is my situation:

My computer became seriously screwed yesterday and so I restarted it a couple of times by holding the power button - this then did something bad to fundamental parts of the computer. On boot up, my computer would hang at the POST screen just before detecting drives.

I read on the internet to unplug the CMOS battery and replace it. That worked, and the computer now recognizes that I have two 160GB HITACHI Deskstar Sata 2 hard drives, the computer also recognizes that they are in raid 0 configuration.

But when it comes down to booting from these HDDs it gives me the "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart." error. It just tries to boot from CD, then if there are no CDs it tries the Hard disks and I get this error.

I also cannot boot from the XP install CD, it just says "Press any key to boot CD" and when I do it just gives me the disk read error again.

I have absolutely nothing on this computer so I don't have any data to lose, I can do whatever this end so even the most drastic things don't matter.


Thanks in advance for any suggestions you may have to offer. : )



My system config is:
Motherboard : ABIT FATAL1TY AN9 32X nForce 590 SLI
CPU : AMD Athlon X2 5000+ Dual Core
Graphics : Gainward Bliss 8800gtx
RAM : 2GB Corsair something or other.

 

Yeah, taking out the CMOS battery would efficiently clear the CMOS settings, therefore making it redetect the drives, so that was good.

However, the problem you are having might be caused by a faulted drive. Essentially, by rebooting by cutting off the power, you might have screwed over your drives... if you do that again, make sure the HDD light is off before reseting.

The advice I'd give you in a situation like this would be to boot off a CD, then try to format the drives, but for some reason that's not working either...

Could you try another bootable CD, maybe a Linux bootable? Try making this CD on another computer, then booting from it: http://www.puppylinux.com/download/downpage.htm

The only other thing I can think of is to add another HDD which works, booting it (Windows or something), then trying to repair/format the other drives.

Good luck!

 

check your hard drives on another computer, if they are good, then you might have a bad motherboard. Though it's not a good idea to do a hard power shutdown to the hard drive, I've done it many a times from frustration and haven't lost a drive to it yet. At worst maybe one of your drives might have gone bad, but very unlikely both of them are bad.

When I had problems with a computer that was acting very strangely, locking up, slow booting up, blue screens read/write errors, I suspected I had a bad hard drive. But when I installed a new hard drive, and the computer wouldn't recognize it or allow me to boot from a cd and install windows, my problem was a bad motherboard. replacing that fix the problem. If your getting "input/output" errors when you try to boot from a cd, thats a sure sign you might have a bad motherboard, thats what I kept seeing on the screen.

 

I would think that when you see the "Press any key to boot from CD...", the keyboard is not being detected. Try pressing NUm Lock and see if it lights off