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Question

A Disk Read Error Occurred

Jan 30, 2014 5:33AM PST

Accch!!

WIN XP Home Edition - put in a new 320GB hard drive a week or two ago; everything reloaded and worked fine. Two days ago, while a DVD was loading, things went wacko ... and Windows would no longer completely load.

Tried Repair, but that was useless; reloaded XP a couple of times, but it wouldn't get past the "Press any key to boot from CD" stage; finally attempted to clean the disk and reload XP last night -- now the Disk Read Error message shows up.

Only have access to www via my MacBook, so downloaded DBAN Boot n Nuke, as well as UBCD528 to burn onto disks; couldn't figure out, though, why the download/burn files showed differently: DBAN download = 15.5 MB but when dragged to burn the disk showed only 229 KB; UBCD download = 487 but when dragged to burn the disk showed only 98 KB. Neither would boot the PC.

What th' ... ?

What's the solution for the Disk Read Error Occurred?
How do I clean the drive and start-a-new?

Many thanks.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Sadly true. XP only supported 127GB drives.
Jan 30, 2014 6:34AM PST

And there are other limitations to old XP. Now you may be asking how to burn .ISO files in Apple's OS X. The good news is there's plenty of pages on that one.
Bob

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Answer
make 3 partitions
Jan 31, 2014 6:56AM PST

equal sizes. You can use the GParted program in a Linux LIVE DVD to do this and to format to NTFS or FAT32 as desired. You can then install XP to the first partition.

https://www.osdisc.com/

the most popular are listed there. You can order, or download an ISO file from the preferred Linux version's site for free and burn to a DVD yourself. Some versions have a Live CD if you don't have a DVD drive.