A disk read error has occurred; press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart

My PC was working fine from so many years, then one morning I started it and saw black screen appearing with an error called "disk read error occurred, press CTRL + ALT + DEL to restart." I did press Ctrl-Alt-Del but again got the same message. I tried booting from the Vista recovery disk, and when it says to press any key to boot from the hard drive, I press it but then it goes to the screen with hardware configuration control and then the screen remains black and it has been like same till 2 hours now. I googled around and many people on different website say once you choose to boot from the hard drive, you can access the recovery console and fix everything there. But I can not even access the recovery console?

Any help is appreciated.

It seems to me that the hard drive that you have in the system is dead. You could try to contact the hard drive manufacturer and ask them for a repair or replacement. If it is under warranty then everything will done for free but if it is not then you will have to pay some extra penny. Also you can order a recovery disk tool from them as well. Instead of buying a whole new hardware component it would good to buy just the hard drive and get things back to work, rather than spend more by purchasing a list of items.

Before hoping that your hard drive is dead, you could also try to use diagnostic tools to test the hard drive, if the diagnostic tool doesnt give you any error then the hard drive isnt dead yet, but if it is, then consider buying a new one. You could also try to connect the hard drive as slave drive rather than master and see if it gets recognized in the pc. If it does shows up in my computer then do some diagnostic, formatting, etc, but before that if there are some data's that are useful to you then immediately back it up to some other drive and then do the needful. Hope that you utilize this idea to troubleshoot the hard drive before throwing it away.

Hi There,

please do not format your hard drive before checking if your data is still in tact, if you have done this already congratulations you are a complete idiot. for everyone else that needs help still try the following:

- Remove HDD
- Plug into another PC
- See if you can recover all your data
- Backup everything and then format

If you do a new installation and it does not want to "see" your hard drive then the connection that goes from your motherboard to the point where you plug your laptop in has failed. Unfortunately the only thing you can do then is replace your motherboard.

However if your laptop can "see" your hdd fine in Bios it is picking up the hdd fine and it's most probably only the hard drives mbr thats missing or corrupt.

Please let me know if any of this information helps.