"Disk Read Error Occurred" - With Brand-New Hard Drive

July 12, 2009 1:03 PM

Getting "Disk Read Error Occurred - Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to Restart" with brand-new ATA-6 hard drive (this model) on a five-year-old Dell Latitude D400 laptop. Bad disk, compatability issue, or doing something wrong? More details inside.

I have a Dell Latitude D400 laptop which is about five years old and works well. My old hard drive went belly-up (terrible clicking noise, and no machine could read it), so I purchased a replacement. Being an older computer, my laptop uses what I believe is now generally referred to as a Parallel ATA (PATA) connector (as shown on the right side here). A cover is placed over the pins before connecting it to the computer.

I chose the largest PATA drive I could find, which on NewEgg is described as using an ATA-6 connector. (My understanding is that ATA-6 is a part of the PATA family.) I placed the disk in my system and began trying to install Windows XP Pro. The Windows installation CD recognized the drive, formatted it, and apparently copied some install files to the drive. (I have used the same install CD without any problems before.)

However, as the installation proceeded, Windows apparently rebooted, and the system could no longer recognize the drive. That's when I got the dreaded "Disk Read Error Occurred - Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to Restart" message. That's all the message says - nothing more. And pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del accomplishes nothing... you just get the same error again.

To isolate the error, I tried three things:

1) I placed the hard drive in a six-year-old Dell Latitude D600 (which also works well, and also uses a PATA connector) but got the same error.

2) I put the drive back in the D400, and, using an Ubuntu Live CD (9.03), my computer was able to recognize the drive. I was even able to partition it and install Ubuntu on it. However, upon restarting, the computer was still unable to recognize the drive. I got some Linux-y error message (I failed to write it down), not the Ctrl+Alt+Del message, but it didn't make any difference - the boot process would not continue, even upon a restart.

3) I also tried putting the drive in a USB enclosure and connected it to the D600. That worked fine - the computer was able to recognize the drive that way, and I could even manipulate files on it. The one thing I will note is that this particular USB enclosure connects the drive directly via the pins - you don't use the pin cover. However, the same pin cover works fine with older drives.

I've scoured the Internet (including older AskMes) for the "disk read error," but pretty much every discussion involves older disks which seem to have failed after a period of use - not brand-new, out of the box drives. So, I'm ultimately unsure what the situation is. My thoughts:

1) I received a bum disk, even though it's brand-new.

2) The ATA-6 connector, or something else about the drive, simply makes it too new to properly connect with older laptops - even though these computers can somehow recognize the drive in the early stages of Windows XP or Ubuntu installation, or via USB connection.

3) The new drive doesn't like the old pin cover, even though the pin cover works fine with older drives.

4) I'm doing something else wrong, or have missed something.

I would, of course, very much like to get this drive working - or return it & get a replacement if that's what is necessary. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

posted by mccn to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

check the BIOS. The drive may be too large. You may have to change the 'compatibility mode'
posted by Gungho at 1:38 PM on July 12, 2009

Seconding the "compatibility mode" thing. After reformatting a friend's dell I had a similar problem. I think one of the options are ACPI vs SATA mode or something like that. I think there is a driver you can install and then you can change it back to the current setting, but i'm unsure.

Older computers also don't like drives larger than 147GB without some coaxing.
posted by JauntyFedora at 1:48 PM on July 12, 2009

Response by poster: Older computers also don't like drives larger than 147GB without some coaxing.

The number I had generally seen as being an obstacle was 137GB. However, on the older D600, I installed a 160GB (149GB actual space available) drive (this one) with zero additional coaxing necessary, so I had hoped this upgrade would also go smoothly. I guess not!

In any event, my D400 is using BIOS version A08 (the latest offered on Dell's website). The only "compatability" setting I see is for "Boot Speed," which offers me 1.80GhZ or "Compatible." I don't think that's what I need, though - and unfortunately, I'm not seeing any other hard-drive related "compatability"-type options in BIOS.
posted by mccn at 2:03 PM on July 12, 2009

Assuming the need to reboot was the result of an abnormal error, check your Dell's boot priority. If the drive wasn't yet configured bootable, you wouldn't be able to boot from it, but might be able to read and write it as a non-boot device. You may need to change the boot priority to CD..HDD..., boot from your CD, and start again.
posted by TruncatedTiller at 2:45 PM on July 12, 2009

Response by poster: Assuming the need to reboot was the result of an abnormal error, check your Dell's boot priority.

I don't think this was the case. I think that in the course of installing Windows, the system normally reboots to continue the install process. (Even though I've re-installed Windows XP many times, I can't remember for certain if this is the case, so please feel free to correct me if I am wrong.) In any event, changing the boot order doesn't affect anything.
posted by mccn at 3:07 PM on July 12, 2009

Best answer: Partition the drive so that the C: drive is smaller than 137 gb. Reinstall. Problem (probably) solved.

Windows (beyond a certain XP service pack) can "see" partitions of mostly any size. But until windows is fully booted up, you have the 137gb barrier to contend with, so the boot partition needs to be smaller than that. The drive probably tried writing/reading to an area of the drive that was inaccessible.

Or the drive is no good. Run the Western Digital drive testing tools to double check.


(The "compatible" option is usually for newer acpi drives that you don't want to use acpi with. This is sata only, shouldn't have to worry about it.)
posted by gjc at 3:21 PM on July 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Partition the drive so that the C: drive is smaller than 137 gb. Reinstall. Problem (probably) solved.

Wow, this actually worked. Thank you so, so much!
posted by mccn at 7:37 PM on July 12, 2009

gjc: "Windows (beyond a certain XP service pack) can "see" partitions of mostly any size. But until windows is fully booted up, you have the 137gb barrier to contend with, so the boot partition needs to be smaller than that."

I know that the OP states below that this fix solved the boot issue, but I have some XP machines that boot a single 750 GB PATA partition and have had no problems moving from SP1->SP2->SP3. I think the 137 GB limit applies only to original, unpatched XP from 2000/2001, and any XP post-SP1 has the 48-bit driver necessary to access disks larger than 137 GB(and up to 128 PiB) built-in and available from first boot. The OP needs to create a slipstreamed XP install disc that incorporates the original XP and at least SP1 to avoid this happening again. DriverPacks are also good to add to a custom Windows install disc.
posted by meehawl at 9:16 PM on July 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Meehawl: Those are all good thoughts, but alas, no. Everything undertaken here was with a very recently slipstreamed SP3 disk. As I noted, even with Ubuntu installed, my computer could not properly recognize the drive. So I'm pretty convinced that something about this drive made my system unhappy on a hardware level, regardless of operating system.

I now have Windows XP fully installed (I'm even typing this on the system with the new hard drive), and I simply have a second (large) partition that I can use for media files, etc. Sure, I'd rather just have one big partition, but this is at most a very minor inconvenience.
posted by mccn at 10:54 PM on July 12, 2009

mccn: "even with Ubuntu installed, my computer could not properly recognize the drive"

That's interesting. I had some bad luck with recent Ubuntu distros (and in fact all Debian-derived releases) when libata ("sda") drivers were hanging trying to access newer, larger ATA drives on older ATA interfaces (especially with Via chipsets). The fix was either to use the older idedisk driver ("hda"), or drop back to an older kernel such as, for example, one of the Puppy Retros. The only modern, full-size distro that worked with the libata driver was SUSE. I didn't go deeply enough into it to see how they did it differently.
posted by meehawl at 4:18 PM on July 13, 2009

I've got a Dell Inspiron 8600, and I had this exact problem when I recently tried to install WinXP SP2 on a 320GB EIDE (PATA) drive.

However, I just successfully installed the OS on a 250GB drive without partitioning. (I tried to partition the drive with an Ubuntu install CD, but windows made me nuke all of it.) After doing a full round of updates, including SP3, everything seems to be running great. The computer can see all 250GBs. In fact, I'm running the Western Digital HD diag tool on the drive right now (from inside windows).

If I understand things correctly when the tool finishes checking all of the disk sectors the computer will have accessed every part of the physical platter.

Would I have anything to worry about if I don't partition the drive? Should I be worried if the BIOS still reads it as 137GB? I'll never boot into DOS or anything. If I still need to partition it what app should I use?
posted by oddman at 5:43 PM on July 15, 2009

Yes, slightly worried. What usually happens is that it will install just fine and work just fine for a long while. But at some point, Windows will put some Important File beyond that barrier, and the computer won't be able to see it during the boot process.

And it may never happen- it's sort of a random thing. Its the odds of it writing a file on the 0-137 area versus the 137-250 area. Plus the odds that it's one of the few files that Windows needs before it loads the driver for larger disks.

Might even be a defragmenting process that causes it.

I can't remember the specifics, but I *think* the issue only applies to older computers whose BIOS doesn't recognize the full size, or computers whose BIOS does recognize it, but still doesn't use 48 bit LBA scheme natively. I am not 100% sure on that.

As for repartitioning, I have never had any luck with shrinking a partition. Sadly. I've always had to backup, repartition, and restore.
posted by gjc at 9:18 PM on July 16, 2009

OK. Thanks for the heads-up. I'll have to go ahead and partition. (The machine has still has almost no data on it. So hopefully shrinking the partition won't be disastrous.)
posted by oddman at 7:45 AM on July 18, 2009