I saw a topic from a very long while back where the guy had the exact same problem as me, with only a few slight differences. Here's what he said:
"I have a Dell Inspiron 8200. I am running XP Pro. I tend to keep my computer on for long periods at a time. This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened but it is by far the worst looking...
My computer doesn't boot up. I don't think I head any hard drive noise at all - i might be mistaken - it is very quiet compared to how it normally sounds.
Anyway, I get a black screen saying: "A disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" This happens again when I restart. :-/
My Safe Mode doesn't work - ie, nothing happens when I hit F8. Sad
When I get into Recovery Console using my XP Pro cd and use Fixmbr the response is: "Writing new master boot record on physical drive \Device\Harddisk0\Partition0. The new master boot record could not be written. The disk may be damaged" Huh?
Chkdsk /P gives the response: "4% completed'
It then waits 5 mins and says: "The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems" Embarrassed
Chkdsk /R gives the same response as Chkdsk /P Cry
When choosing the "Set up Windows option" from the cd i get: "an error occurred while Setup was updating partition information on: 38155 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR] Setup cannot continue." Angry
Is my hard disk buggerred???
Do I need to reformat the whole thing?
Can I recover important, personal files etc once I format and reinstall windows?
Where can I get such a program?
Please help... Shocked"
I was having the same exact problem, (cept my computer was custom built by a friend of mine, and it was sorta state of the art... 4 years ago, still pretty good today though) so assuming my HDD was busted I bought a new one and gave the old one to another friend to try and recover the data. Everything was going hunkey dorey with my new hard drive and then a day later I get the exact same error message and the exact same problem. Obviously something in my computer other than the harddrive is causing them to crash, either that or something's making it look like it's crashed. Anyone have any ideas as to what might be causing this?
Fans not cooling things enough maybe? New motherboard or other major part is needed? I really have no idea, and I'd like to know what's wrong with it before I go plunking down money for things that will just break because of a bigger problem. Any advice at all really would be greatly appreciated. Thanks :-)
