Laptop shows "disk read error occurred; Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

[Aunnix]

I have an Acer Aspire 5742 laptop and for the last month or so it has been randomly freezing on startup every few days. As of this last few days to a week it won't boot and gives me this error message:

"disk read error occurred; Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

So, I am thinking the hard drive is bad or going bad. So, I changed the boot order so the disc drive had 1st boot priority. I tried a Hiren's Boot CD and tried and Windows 7 disc to test and try to repair hoping it may be a bad boot sector. Upon boot it gives me the message again. I don't think it even tries to boot the disc.

I then took the hard drive out of the laptop and hooked it up to another laptop running XP. I checked Disk Management and the hard drive doesn't show up/register.

I don't know of anything else I can really do if it isn't recognized. I guess I'm looking for any additional advice on what to try so I can salvage my data. Any help is appreciated!

 

[smorizio]

turn the drive off let it cool down for a day. try and tap it lightly to see if it a stuck spindal arm. if not and the drive making noise or spining down...you waited to long to do a backup. you can try some high end recovry software or a data lab to rebuild the drive. if your real lucky the drive might have one or two more boot in it.

 

[Aunnix]

turn the drive off let it cool down for a day. try and tap it lightly to see if it a stuck spindal arm. if not and the drive making noise or spining down...you waited to long to do a backup. you can try some high end recovry software or a data lab to rebuild the drive. if your real lucky the drive might have one or two more boot in it.

Cool. I will have to check on it in the next few days (busy with the holiday) and try tapping the arm loose (if stuck). It was spinning when I first had it hooked up to the laptop, but still not recognized in Disk Management. Any idea on why it won't boot from the CD? I don't know of any problems with the optical drive. Could this be caused by a failing hard drive?

Yeah, I don't know if the data on it is worth paying for the recovery services as I know they are expensive. Same for the rebuilding, lol, which sounds even more expensive.

 

[Aunnix]

try it on other computer, er enter PE to save data. There must be bad sectors on the disk, so you'd better save data as soon as possible. To check and repair bad sectors you can use partitionguru free which is a free tool. I tried it brfore, and it worked well.

I have a SATA to USB transfer kit, which is what I used when I pulled the hard drive out and said I had it hooked up to another laptop. So, if the HDD was still good it should have been recognized similar to an external HDD and able to view in the Disk Management, correct? I wouldn't think it would matter if I hooked up this way compared to actually breaking open another laptop (/PC) and fully installing it into the system and trying to boot (which wouldn't work because the hardware is different)...

I'm not sure what you mean by "enter PE to save data." Can you elaborate a little?

Another thing I find odd is that while in the Acer laptop the BIOS sees the HDD, but when hooked up to the functioning laptop via the USB cable it is not recognized.

 

[smorizio]

with windows sometime the drive is found but you have to go to windows disk management and give it a drive letter. also depending on how good the kit is some kits work better then others.

 

[Aunnix]

with windows sometime the drive is found but you have to go to windows disk management and give it a drive letter. also depending on how good the kit is some kits work better then others.

Sorry for the delay in response. The laptop belongs to my girlfriend's sister and I gave it back to her already, but she went a head and bought a new one for pretty cheap during the Black Friday deals. So, I am going to give her some cash for the old one, order the recovery media and throw a new hard drive in it. I will try to assign the letter to her old hard drive and see if I can get it to be recognized by disk management (as currently, disk management does not list any other hard drives attached to the PC besides the one and only hard drive this PC is running from).

Any ideas on why the system will not boot from the CD ROM? I have yet to try another hard drive in it to see if I can boot a Windows CD with a new setup, but I would imagine the hard drive wouldn't affect the boot up sequence assigned by the BIOS.

 

[smorizio]

if the drive hangs hard...it hang the sata ports all of them...the cd rom wont be seen. if it not a hard hang...a lot of times with laptop cd roms the laser fails on them.