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

[shawntae]

I have tried upgrading my system to vista after burning vista ISO image on to a dvd but just on initial reboot I am getting error saying "A disk read error occurred press ctrl-alt-del to reboot" I did rebooted my system several times but same error is coming up again and again. I never had such issue while installing xp, dont know what's wrong. I did not encountered any suspicious error while installing vista as well but no idea what went wrong after installation. Is there anything i need to check out to get rid of this error?

[jigu902003]

I wanted to know if you have ran Vista Upgrade Advisor tests to make sure whether your system can run windows vista or not? I see some people facing same error and in their case they had tried installing vista on system below its requirement. I dont know how come they got it installed but after installation they had faced same error at initial boot. Just check out and let me know what i have asked for so that i can understand your issue better and will suggest you further possible workarounds accordingly.

[shawntae]

Yes i had ran and my system had passed the test without any issues, it is above system requirement for vista (800MHz, 768MB RAM, GeForce 5500 FX)) I dont think that this error is because i am having a old system. Its something else but i am not bale to make out exactly what. I have Googled out the error and have come across many threads but none of them had effective solution for fixing this error. I have tried reinstalling vista as well, same Disk Read Error message come up at initial boot. Since it says "Disk Read Error" i wanted to know if there can be any issue with my system drive? any ideas?

[Abdulmajid]

You should have posted your system configuration, anyways i wanted to know how much ram you are having installed in your system ? are you having more than one stick? if yes then you can remove others and try booting your system with one ram and check out if it is booting fine.There are so many threads in this forum where people have faced such errors after installing vista in their system,I have checked out some for your case and have come across some mentioning that they were having 3 x 1gb ram installed in their system. Their system was not booting with all ram installed together and they have to lower their ram in order to get it working. I am not sure if you might be having same case or not but you can surely check that you.

[druedger]

I have faced same error and i will like to inform you that its not because of ram. It is just that Vista rewrites the partition table because of which the drive letter gets changed and AHCI gets enabled automatically. for eg If you try to install vista in c drive where your hard drive is set to IDE then while system reboots during the installation process then drive letter gets changed to something else and IDE gets swapped to AHCI. So now your IDE drive wont appear as master boot device giving Disk Read Error. I dont know why it make those changes, in order to get rid of the error take a back up of your hard drive, format it and do a clean installation. I had done same thing in my case and every thing went fine after that.

[GrittyBurns]

I tried to re-install vista today and got this message after the first restart.

I began by placing the vista disk which came withthe machine into the CD-ROM.

Promted by windows I choose to install vista and now I get this message, I've already backed everything up off my hard drive, is there anyway to install vista/7 from scratch at this point?