Disk Read Error!!

[Joe563]

Hi, when i start up my computer i get a "Disk read error press CTRL + ALT + DEL to restart Tried everything and nothing seems to work. I put the windows xp home edition installation C.D in and selected boot from C.D, it then says windows is inspecting your p.c then the screen goes black for agesand the c.d stops spinning! I despretly need someones help.

I was thinking of changing the IDE cables and buying a new hard drive, what do u lot think?

Ive done near enough everything, gone to bois loaded system fail safe defaults. Im at the end.

Any help would be appreciated!

Ive got windows xp home SP2

2Ghz intel, two 80 GB hard drives, 1024 MB ram

 

[Ste]

Put that harddrive in another PC as a slave drive, get any important data off of it and buy a new Drive.

If it is a mechcanical Failure, you might not even be able to get the data off without spending big bucks to have a company do it.

 

[Law]

I would first check the IDE cable, switch out for a known working one, I see you have two hard drive..is the other one still working? You can attach it to another computer just to make sure the original computer's IDE connector on the motherboard isn't broken. So on another computer you can run powermax to test the hard drive.

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/M...oftware Downloads/All Downloads&downloadID=22

If your backup data reside on that second hard drive...you can still partition at least 4 gig of space for XP using GpartEd (free partitioning software). So there you could iinstall XP. Just be careful how you do thing if you don't want to wipe that data clean by accident.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

I put the windows xp home edition installation C.D in and selected boot from C.D, it then says windows is inspecting your p.c then the screen goes black for agesand the c.d stops spinning!

This part I'm a little concern that it could be a bad RAM or a bad CD drive.