"A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restar

[stephen]

"A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart"

PC will not boot receive the above error on a black screen, as the PC tries to boot from the Hard Disk.

Tried booting from the XP CD into the recovery console command prompt, ran
fixboot c:
and
fixmbr
also
chkdsk c: /r

None of the above helped.

Solution 1
Try booting from a CD with fixntldr
see
http://www.tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm
This allows the PC to boot from the CD and then start the Windows OS on the Hard Disk.
This allowed access to your desktop.
I plugged in a USB External Hard Disk and ran Microsoft NTBACKUP and did a
full backup to the external Hard Disk.
I noted that some rootkit files did not make it to the backup ie access denied errors (which was a good thing)
I used Seagate DISKTOOLS to do a full erase of the Hard Disk zero filled.
I reinstalled Windows XP from CD
I restarted PC in Safe Mode (Directory Restore Mode)
I ran MS NTBACKUP and did a restore using the previous backup file I selected Advanced options and selected to overwrite all files.
After restore rebooted the PC and everything worked fine with all the applications and user settings restored.



Solution 2
Install a new Hard Disk
reinstall the operating system and applications on the new hard disk, Then copy the files and settings from the old Hard Disk.

connect the old disk as drive E:
create a temp user login eg temp
create the user login eg john
login as john and logout this creates the john profile under Documents and Settings
login as temp
then copy e:\Document and Settings\John
to c:\Document and Settings\John

Now john can login and have his settings copied from the old disk.

You also need to reinstall any programs such as Office Games etc....