A Disk Read Error Occurred Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to Reboot

I have burned the final Vista ISO image from my MSDN Subscriber Downloads and
installed it. I have tried XP Upgrades and clean installs on several
different drives. It appears to install/upgrade successfully each time.
When it does the initial reboot I get the error: "A disk read error occurred
press ctrl-alt-del to reboot" every time. What are the BIOS requirements for
Vista? Is it possible my machine is too old? I have a Dell Dimension XPS
T800r. I have downloaded and installed the latest BIOS (A11) from Dell's
site and still no dice. My machine [barely] passes the Vista Upgrade Advisor
tests (800MHz, 768MB RAM, GeForce 5500 FX).

I have the same problem on a similar machine Dell Dimension XPS T600r and
cannot find any way around this problem. I think maybe the machine is just
too old for Vista so maybe time to upgrade to a higher spec. PC.

Hey Brian and Doug!

Same problem here: Disk read error after first reboot. Quite obviously there
is no decent boot-sector when Vista tries to reboot.

My machine is fairly new (1 year) and passed the Upgrade Advisor without any
problems (2GB of RAM; Intel Pentium 4; 3.2GHz; 1GB L2 Cache; GeForce 6600 LE)

I also ran out of ideas what the probably cause might be ...

Mine was easy to discount given the age of the machine. Yours definitely
seems like it should work. I'd call MS tech support.

processors haven't ever been much of an issue, it is the chipset / mobo.
report mobo, drive connection (pata/sata/scsi/firewire/fc-al/etc.,), ram
size, video card, network connection as these have the most effect on
ability to install/boot.

Hey Brian,

I did. But they really don't know what's going on either. Memory might be a
factor and they said it might work if I take out one of my memory sticks.
I haven't tried that yet, but if you ask me I'd say it is rather ridiculous
if I have to reduce my RAM to get Vista installed ...

Problem for them was of course, that there is no real error message
involved. Anything could be the problem ...

[druedger]

I have the same problem on a brand new machine. Whatever MS support tells you is complete rubbish. Your RAM is not the problem. I know what the problem is, but I haven't found a way to resolve it just yet.

Basically, Vista rewrites the partition table for your disk so that what used to be the C drive prior to the upgrade is now seen as something else. In my system I have 4 drives, 3 of which are SATA, and my boot drive is IDE. When Vista reboots, it automatically enables AHCI, which on my machine results in all of the drives appearing to the system in a different order than if AHCI is not enabled. So what happens in my case is my IDE drive is no longer appearing as the master boot device, even though the BIOS is configured for it to be.

I believe the Boot Sector of the disk and/or MBR has to be manually edited to tell Vista where the OS installation is located. Unfortunately, this is not a layman level of activity. So far I have validated that my disk contains the Vista installation and has the Vista boot loader files installed, but I haven't been able to figure out how Vista identifies the boot device and partition yet. If I can figure that out, I should be able to edit the disk so that Vista knows where to fins the boot loader.

On a side note, if I do a clean install instead of an upgrade, it works fine. This appears to be a problem only when upgrading because something about the disk manager assignment of drive letters to devices gets hosed when doing the upgrade installation. By the way, I had the same problem when upgrading my XP from service pack 2 to service pack 3.