I have a problem that I was wondering whether anyone could help me with. : D

Here's the deal, I am a semi noob when it comes to computing in this sense and this is my situation:

My computer became seriously screwed yesterday and so I restarted it a couple of times by holding the power button - this then did something bad to fundamental parts of the computer. On boot up, my computer would hang at the POST screen just before detecting drives.

I read on the internet to unplug the CMOS battery and replace it. That worked, and the computer now recognizes that I have two 160GB HITACHI Deskstar Sata 2 hard drives, the computer also recognizes that they are in raid 0 configuration.

But when it comes down to booting from these HDDs it gives me the "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart." error. It just tries to boot from CD, then if there are no CDs it tries the Hard disks and I get this error.

I also cannot boot from the XP install CD, it just says "Press any key to boot CD" and when I do it just gives me the disk read error again.

I have absolutely nothing on this computer so I don't have any data to lose, I can do whatever this end so even the most drastic things don't matter.


Thanks in advance for any suggestions you may have to offer. : )



My system config is:
Motherboard : ABIT FATAL1TY AN9 32X nForce 590 SLI
CPU : AMD Athlon X2 5000+ Dual Core
Graphics : Gainward Bliss 8800gtx
RAM : 2GB Corsair something or other.

OK, You have two options:
(1) Try an automated repair option
(2) Reinstall Windows

Your best bet would be formatting the drives and starting of over (2)

Hey, thanks for the reply. I'm up for trying what you suggested, but could you tell me how to do the things you said?

Thanks

When you replaced the CMOS battery it restet the BIOS settings.
If you are using a USB or wireless keyboard, it may not be detecting it and thus not responding to the press any key. If you can get into the BIOS setup and change the settings, check to see that the RAID boot drive is second (under the CD) in the boot order screen, also make sure the USB setting is set to Legacy or Auto.

If you still can't boot to the CD, try a different CD. You may have a bad disc or drive or cable or ide controller, etc.

You can keep going down the list. Try the simple things first, BIOS settings, make sure the cables didn't come loose...
Start with that and see what happens.
Good luck.

This might be tricky without booting to a cd...

Before you can do anything, I have to know that you can boot to a floppy or an xp setup disk

Try The following:

(1) Try booting to a win98 startup disk, which can be found in the download section I think. If not, you can it google it.
(2) Access the bios and remove the HD(s) from the boot order and try booting to the xp setup disk (CD)


If you can boot to a floppy, but not to a CD, i will give you detailed instructions to boot to the floppy and use fdisk to remove partition(s) and then use the dos prompt to start the 16 bit installer on the setup cd.

If you can't boot to either, then you just might out of luck.
--
One more thing. I thought one more thing that you can do. (and it just might fix your problem)
(1) Run chkdsk - either from the dos prompt after booting to a floppy, or from xp, on a secondary computer.

Ok very positive things happening here, I just plugged in an old ps/2 keyboard and for some reason the xp install cd booted, I am now in that first setup screen of the install. What should I do now?

How do I change usb to legacy or auto? because I had a trouble with the mouse in the first place, it wouldn't move and that was the reason i kept hard rebooting it.

Thanks

The option for usb legacy is in the bios.

Like I said, you could try repair. Press r on the first screen I think.

Or you can continue the setup, although i recommend formatting first. If you don't want to format, just delete the partition in setup and then create a new one and install into that.

Fixed it guys. When i unplugged the CMOS battery it reset the bios and i had to enable the raid configuration in the bios again for the HDDs to be read correctly. When I did that it booted straight from the disk.

Thanks to everyone who helped. I'm so glad it is back working.

OH... I forgot you had a RAID config. Yup... That will do it.

Glad you got it working

Exxcellent!