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.