Disk Read Error Occured.... and a solution

[mikelbeck]

A customer dropped off his Dell Dimension 8250 that wouldn't boot. I had replaced the original hard drive a few months back with a 200 GB Maxtor, and it's been fine since. The other day it refused to boot and displayed a message that said "A disk read error has occured, Please CTRL ALT DEL to restart" and nothing else.

So, I built a boot floppy, tried that. It started up, hit the hard drive and then got a black screen.

Then I popped in a Windows XP CD, it booted from that, showed the "checking hardware configuration" message and then a black screen.

I went into the BIOS to have a look at some of the settings, nothing looked out of whack. So I set it all back to the defaults and restarted. Same result.

While it was booting I noticed that the BIOS version was "A01", which sounded to me like the first version. So I went off to Dell's web site to see if there were any updates and found that the latest was "A04". I pulled that down, put it on a floppy and flashed the machine. Restarted afterwards and it came right up!

I have no idea why it would be working fine one day and the next would refuse to boot, or why updating the BIOS would allow it to start working. I didn't see anything in the release notes about the newer BIOS version fixing a problem like this... but as long as it's working I'm happy.

FYI, if you come across this error you might want to check for a newer BIOS and see if that fixes it. :p

[vantim]

That is strange. Maybe the bios update had some updates for the drive controller. Especially with accessing large drives.

[bufordt]

I have been getting a lot of those issues at the shop lately also. Seems to be related to MS updates wanting to work with newer versions of the Bios. Dell is aware of the problem, but trying to get them to admit it is not very easy. It does help when you buy a lot of systems from them with 4 hour platinum service and they send techs out two or three a day for a week. All new mother boards with the updated bios, and the old boards were tested and updated and put back into service. Then after 12 replaced boards, they figured it out.

[vantim]

I hate Dell.

[bufordt]

I hate Dell.

but I can't beat their warranty service. Especially on their servers. But 45 systems, 32 hard drives replaced, 18 motherboards, 3 twice, and two raid controllers later, and they still have not been down as much as the IBM or the compaq systems.