Won't boot, "disc read error"

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spizzle

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OK well I seem to have a bit of a problem here. My computer won't boot. I don't know what the problem is. I put it on sleep mode for a couple hours last night, and then started the comp back up. It wouldn't load internet explorer or anything, but I could look around in the start bar. After a couple tries to boot IE I tried to go to the Task manager, and nothing happened. So I hit the reset button.

When it was booting I decided to just look around in the BIOS at what was in there. The only thing I changed was disabling "Drive A" because I don't have a floppy drive. When I went to start the computer back up, it gets to the black screen where it says verifying DMI pool data but it won't start up. After 30 seconds or so it says "Disc read error, please press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart." I hit Ctrl Alt Del and it does nothing. I thought disabling the A drive did something bad, so I tried loading the fail-safe defaults and the optimized defaults in the BIOS, and the same thing happens.

I don't know what to try next because I don't know what the **** is wrong. I messed around with OC'ing the processor and GPU with Easytune and the Catalyst center, but I disabled both of them, so it wasn't OC'd at the time. I also didn't play with any of the settings in the BIOS because I didn't know how to do it. Could the HDD have taken a dump already???



I just put this together Thursday night, after ordering it with the advice of some people on this forum. The specs are:

C2D E8400
Gigabyte EP45 UD3p mobo
Radeon HD4850 X2
Gskill DDR2 1000 4GB RAM
Western Digital Caviar SE16 750GB HDD

Looking at the reviews of it on NewEgg, the last two reviews have had 3 out of 5 of these drives die within a month. Does it sound like this is the problem?? If so, I'm going to start the return process at NewEgg.
 
Sounds like the boot partition got jacked when you reset it. I would just go ahead and reinstall windows since you just built it. Thats going to be the easiest solution.
 
Will I need to format the drive, or just reinstall/repair the Windows installation? Although those two pretty much go hand in hand, correct?

I forgot to mention it's running Vista, whether that matters or not.
 
OK well I've got the boot disc running, but when I go to repair Windows it brings up a list of installed operating systems, but it doesn't find my OS on the hard drive. The list is empty, and the options are either "next" or "load drivers" where it wants me to install the drivers that came with my hard drive?? OK well it didn't come with any.

If I hit next, it's going to repair unknown OS on an unknown drive, is that going to work?? I don't know what to do at this point if it's not finding my previous installation of Vista.
 
Well it has the option to search for start-up problems and repair them or whatever. So what should I do then, reformat the drive and reinstall Windows or what? Do you reformat with the Vista boot disc or do I have to do it from the BIOS or command prompt?
 
Boot from the vista disc, reformat and reinstall. Also, from the sound of it, you might want to go into the bios and make sure that the board is seeing the hard drive. If somehow the board got switched it could need to be set to the "ide mode" which would be why its not seeing the hard drive when booting/installing.
 
OK I'll try doing that later today. Last time I looked in the BIOS it was still recognizing the hard drive and the CD/DVD drive on the SATA slots. I don't know why the Vista disc couldn't find the installation.

Well I double checked and the hard drive's still being read in the BIOS. I see a setting called "IDE Channel Master 1" and it's set to Auto. When I went to reinstall Windows and reformat the drive though, it still won't find it. If the thing was dead, would it still show up in the BIOS? I'm not really sure what to do at this point. Thoughts?
 
Make certain you haven't changed any of the settings in your BIOS to RAID.
Chances are that your hard drive is dead even though it shows in the BIOS.

The Vista disc repair option is very good and it usually works, but if you are trying to reinstall Vista and it cannot find a hard drive then it is a good sign the hard drive is dead.

Try downloading the below DOS version and burning to CD and booting up on it to analyse your hard drive.
WD Support > Downloads > SATA Hard Drives > WD Caviar Blue / SE / SE16 (SATA II)
 
OK this is ****ing ridiculous. I bought a new drive, a 750 GB Western Digital Caviar Black because the one that just died is discontinued now. It got here today, booted up just fine, installed windows, and got all my updates. I left it at the user log-in screen while I went to run some errands. I just got back after being gone for about 2 hours. I go to log-in, and guess what??? This one appears to have died as well. It wouldn't log in, it just sat there for a couple minutes. So I reset it, and now it's giving me the disc read error again.

I'm going to throw in the Windows boot disc again and see if the drive's actually dead or not. If it is, I'm never buying WD again. Talk about ridiculous.
 
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