A disk read error occurred

[ralphrj]

Booted up the PC this morning only to get a black screen with the above message and no Windows.

Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart hasn't worked. SSD dead?

[ARHarh]

ralphrj said:

Booted up the PC this morning only to get a black screen with the above message and no Windows.

Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart hasn't worked. SSD dead?

Check the connections first. Get into bios and see if the disk shows up. Then boot from usb stick with windows install media or something on it and see if it can see the disk. Windows install media will probably fix it if the disk is working OK.

[ralphrj]

Thanks! Will give it a go.

[eps]

Which reminds me - need to do a backup!!!

[toastyhamster]

SSDs do seem to have some quirks compared to platter disks. Sold a jukebox a couple of years ago, had a call it wasn't booting up (XP due to weird hardware and lack of up to date drivers). Went through everything, cold start, reseating memory, it wasn't til I unplugged the disk I could get into the BIOS, never had that before in (too many) years of PC fiddling, plugged it back in and it worked perfectly, that was 6 months ago and it gets daily use. Very odd.

[otherman]

It's also worth changing the data cable. I've had those fail and cause a disk read error.

[ralphrj]

After several attempts to restart and access the BIOS without success it eventually gave a more informative message that there was an issue with the winload.exe file and it needed the installation disc.

I wonder what I did with that...

[ARHarh]

ralphrj said:

After several attempts to restart and access the BIOS without success it eventually gave a more informative message that there was an issue with the winload.exe file and it needed the installation disc.

I wonder what I did with that...

You can download windows install media to USB stick from their website https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/... enjoy

[ralphrj]

ARHarh said:

You can download windows install media to USB stick from their website https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/... enjoy

Thanks, my issue with that is that the only other computer I have access to at the moment is a mac.

However, I will ask a friend to download it to a USB for me.

[Durzel]

You would think it actually trying to load Windows would be a good sign. In my experience SSDs dying basically happen spontaneously and dramatically - i.e. the drive ceases to be seen by the computer.

[ralphrj]

Windows successfully reinstalled earlier and PC running happily. Powered it off and turned it on again later, Windows loads but keyboard doesn't work, restart, same as original problem "a disk read error occurs". This time Windows can't be reinstalled on the SSD.