"A Disk Read Error Occurred Press CTRL+ALT+DEL To Restart Computer"

[ultrazen]

I have a Toshiba laptop X775-Q7384 w. 8GB RAM (x64). I just had the 2 HDD's replaced as well as a new motherboard. I formatted the 2 new drives with Acronis Home Disk 11. I set the BIOS to load defaults. Then I tried to install a clean version of WIN 7 Ultimate x64. The installation starts & appears to install (extracts files, etc.)but upon every automatic first reboot (to continue the install) I continually get the (DOS screen) message "A Disk Read Error Occurred Press CTRL+ALT+DEL To Restart Computer". I CAN install the OS with the Recovery Disks which I do not want to do to avoid the bloatware that comes prepackaged & since I can load the drivers separately.

Can someone please suggest why this is happening & how to accomplish the clean re-install? Thanks. (nice to be back)

 

[chris674]

On the first reboot, I would boot to the Win7 install disc. Go to Repair Computer. Click on Startup Recovery. The wizard will automatically run and it should fix your startup errors.

Hope that helped,

Chris

 

[ultrazen]

On the first reboot, I would boot to the Win7 install disc. Go to Repair Computer. Click on Startup Recovery. The wizard will automatically run and it should fix your startup errors.
Hope that helped,
Chris

Thanks for the suggestion Chris. However, booting to the Win7 install disc just starts the entire Re-install again. There is no "Startup Recovery".

 

[ultrazen]

I managed to find an answer to this problem. I was using a WIN 7 ULT x64 disk from <www . heidoc.net/joomla/technology-science/microsoft/14-windows-7-direct-download-links > [don't forget to remove the 'spaces' between these letters!] which are all legal ISO downloads. It's also important to download the "ei.cfg Removal Utility" on that page and use it to remove (actually to "prevent") the ei.cfg file from the ISO file, BEFORE one burns the DvD for installation. [These disks run a little differently than the retail versions].

The REAL PROBLEMS were solved by doing the following. They were;

#1 I did NOT properly change the BOOT ORDER in the BIOS to the CD/DvD drive. One SHOULD do this and can change it back to the HDD AFTER completing the installation. I DID use F12 (to get into the BIOS) to change the boot order but that was not sufficient. I should have used F2 to get into the BIOS instead. The effects are different because the F2 command in the full BIOS screen maintains (or keeps) that order until one manually changes it back again, whereas the F12 Boot Order command only works for 1 (one) boot of the system.

#2 The next solution to using these disks is that one must choose "Custom" instead of "Typical" when installing WIN 7. This puts you into a screen where the drive(s) are shown & one has the option of choosing which drive one wants to install the OS on.

#3 On that same page, the next (apparently essential) step was to choose the "Drive Options (Advanced)" button and to choose "FORMAT" the drive in the next screen. This only takes a few seconds to complete. As explained in my original post I HAD formatted my drives with the Acronis software but this was apparently not sufficient because after every boot I got the dreaded "A Disk Read Error Occurred" message. In other words even after installing WIN 7 the automatic re-boot would just go straight into this error message. So by using the WIN 7 disk "format" option, before installing, the automatic re-boot DID continue the installation as it should.

Hope this helps others to overcome this horrendous situation. Ciao!

 

[hang-the-9]

I managed to find an answer to this problem. I was using a WIN 7 ULT x64 disk from <www . heidoc.net/joomla/technology-science/microsoft/14-windows-7-direct-download-links > [don't forget to remove the 'spaces' between these letters!] which are all legal ISO downloads. It's also important to download the "ei.cfg Removal Utility" on that page and use it to remove (actually to "prevent") the ei.cfg file from the ISO file, BEFORE one burns the DvD for installation. [These disks run a little differently than the retail versions].

The REAL PROBLEMS were solved by doing the following. They were;

#1 I did NOT properly change the BOOT ORDER in the BIOS to the CD/DvD drive. One SHOULD do this and can change it back to the HDD AFTER completing the installation. I DID use F12 (to get into the BIOS) to change the boot order but that was not sufficient. I should have used F2 to get into the BIOS instead. The effects are different because the F2 command in the full BIOS screen maintains (or keeps) that order until one manually changes it back again, whereas the F12 Boot Order command only works for 1 (one) boot of the system.

#2 The next solution to using these disks is that one must choose "Custom" instead of "Typical" when installing WIN 7. This puts you into a screen where the drive(s) are shown & one has the option of choosing which drive one wants to install the OS on.

#3 On that same page, the next (apparently essential) step was to choose the "Drive Options (Advanced)" button and to choose "FORMAT" the drive in the next screen. This only takes a few seconds to complete. As explained in my original post I HAD formatted my drives with the Acronis software but this was apparently not sufficient because after every boot I got the dreaded "A Disk Read Error Occurred" message. In other words even after installing WIN 7 the automatic re-boot would just go straight into this error message. So by using the WIN 7 disk "format" option, before installing, the automatic re-boot DID continue the installation as it should.

Hope this helps others to overcome this horrendous situation. Ciao!

This is actually the normal best practice way of installing Windows, but it's good that you posted this after having issues at it shows that not everyone does things this way. We see a lot of poeple that post tha they can't install Windows, but in most cases they are doing some weird steps instead of the straightforward way of booting off the DVD, wiping and re-creating the partition, formatting and installing.

 

[PBo]

Hi,

Thank you all for sharing your experience with this problem. It occured to me yesterday as I was upgrading a Samsung laptop from Vista 32 to Windows 7 32 bits. During the upgrade, when the computer rebooted, I think it was the second time, after decompressing windows files, I got the error "A disk read error occurred" ...

I thought it might have been because I didn't put the disk screws on, standard IO error, so I restored a backup, started the upgrade again -- with screws on --, did some chkdsk while the install was running, all OK, the same error occured again.

The hardware used to work perfectly with Vista, including the Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB SSD disk, hardly 3 months old. There is no ATA cable, the disk is plugged directly on the controller board. It happened even after the PC had had plenty of time to cool down.

After some googling and reading, I thought there was something wrong with the partition, I thought of the alignment. I had made the partition on my other PC with AOMEI software and restored it with Macrium reflect.

I booted with the Win7 disk, tried the automatic repair option which found nothing wrong.

Then, following an advice in an other thread, I ran diskpart to create a new partition, thinking that the Microsoft utility would certainly make the partition the way the install program is able to use it. I made a new partition on the disk. Then, still from diskpart, displayed the info about the first partition and noticed its cluster size was 16k. The standard size would be 4k.

A few years ago, I already had problems with bigger than 4k cluster size, as the hibernate option would disappear every other boot (took me 2 years to fix) !!! Provided the driver that initially loads the system at boot is very primitive, it occured to me that it might definitely be incompatible with a non-standard cluster size. So I took the disk back to the other PC, changed cluster size with Acronis partition utility, then bingo : it booted !

The relief was short though because after a minute or 2, install stopped saying that this PC could not be upgraded ! I thought the install was messed up because of the geometry change, restarted the upgrade and this time it finished.

So it is strongly unadvised to use a non-standard cluster size on a Windows system partition. Second time and last time I get trapped. It's surprising and disappointing that Microsoft doesn't check the cluster size in their utility to fix the boot.

I hope it will help.