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General discussion

After reformat: A disk read error occurred.

Aug 9, 2010 12:12AM PDT

I was reformatting my neighbors computer, but we have ran into a problem. After finishing partition reformat his disk, we received a error that said:

A disk read error occurred. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart.

The error appeared on bootup.

We were running on Windows 7 but downgrading back to XP.

What could be the problem? Thanks!

Discussion is locked

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It could be the old SATA hard drive issue or a bad drive.
Aug 9, 2010 12:50AM PDT

I don't have enough details to tell you which but the good news is the XP SATA hard drive issue is well discussed so I don't have to write more about that.
Bob

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Hi, thanks for replying.
Aug 9, 2010 8:16PM PDT
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Did you see that?
Aug 9, 2010 11:37PM PDT

I see no primary hard disk in the BIOS. Fix that.

As to booting the XP CD, common issues are BIOS boot order is wrong, CD is too old, non-bootable or the CD ROM is old and needs cleaning or replaced.

In short, this machine is not ready to install XP. It needs repair.

And again, I no longer discuss XP and SATA issues. There are now some million posts about that. Pick one you like.
Bob