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General discussion

Problem with IDE-0.

by Calaschysm Jun 10, 2005 5:56AM PDT

There had been a few brief power outages, then my computer shut down and said something about scanning NTFS for problems(I think, something about NTFS), but that locked up every time. Then it got where it just says

"Searching for Boot Record from IDE-0..OK
A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

I did a diagnostic check of my harddrive, but it says everything is fine. I tried booting it with the XP CD, but after saying "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration..." it goes to a grayish screen and doesn't do anything else.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Discussion is locked

7 Posts
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RE
by dagger906 Jun 10, 2005 6:05AM PDT

IDE-0 just means you primary hard drive, the one with OS on it, in most cases. It looks just like a random error, except diskscan doesn't pick it up...

I think it's probably software problems with the OS, and not your harddrive's fault. You may have to format and reinstall Windows XP.

If you do, make sure to use FAT and not NTFS. NTFS is more advanced and supposedly has better error checking abilities. It just doesn't work so well in the real world.

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Re:RE
by Calaschysm Jun 10, 2005 6:10AM PDT

What do I do to format it? I've done it before, but that was with the CD working.

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floppy
by dagger906 Jun 10, 2005 6:23AM PDT

You'll need to get a floppy boot disk. Many different websites offer different versions for download. Copy to the floppy, and it should allow you to format the harddrive. You have to go into bios first and make sure the floppy drive is set as the first boot device.

I've haven't done this for a long time, and the only floppy boot disk I've used are old DOS disks. So, I'm not sure how well downloaded bootdisks would work...

http://www.bootdisk.com/

There are many other sites, just Google search it.

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No luck
by Calaschysm Jun 10, 2005 11:46AM PDT

I downloaded the boot disks for XP Home from Microsoft's site and put the first one in. It said:

"Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration..."
Then went to a screen that says:

"File \biosinfo.inf could not be loaded.
The error code is 528.
Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit."

Any suggestions?

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Generic boot disks
by dagger906 Jun 10, 2005 12:58PM PDT

You may want to get one of the generic boot disks from other sites. Do a Google search for BootDisk, I'm sure lots of sites offer different types. If everything else fails, try to get copy of a floppy containing old MS-DOS OS. It won't recognize the NTFS format, but you can still use it to format the harddrive.

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use old 98 boot floppy
by skippyd333 Jun 10, 2005 1:10PM PDT

In dos, at "A" promt type fdisk. Delete partiton-non dos partition. create new. reboot with floppy. format. then change your bios back to cdrom first and boot with xp disk. I recommend when setting up XP again, when you get to their format section do a quick reformat back to NTFS. It is more stable and quicker with larger drives.

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Thanks
by Calaschysm Jun 11, 2005 7:01AM PDT

I got the 98 boot disk to work, formatted, and have installed most of the programs I had.

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