Randem Systems Support Board

Aloha tyoungnj,
 
Glad this fix has help you! I hope many others are able to find it also.

So I read this solution with great skepticism, but I'm happy to admit I was totally wrong and you were right! Used this solution on a laptop with the dreaded Disk Read Error message that appeared out of the blue. This was on a Dell Inspiron 600m laptop, which is about ~5-6 years old. The disk was a replacement Seagate 160gb, installed about 4 years ago. It already had the most current BIOS version (A17), so my options were somewhat limited - wipe the drive and reinstall everything, or try this solution. Luckily I tried this and it worked!
 
Here are the steps I went through
- Pull drive from laptop and put in external case with USB interface, connected to another PC
- Install Macrium Reflect Free Edition (find it at download.com) and make an image of the drive just in case
- Install Easeus Partion Master Personal edition (free, at partition-tool.com) and reduce the partion size to ~90gb. There was only about 17gb of data on the drive, so the resizing was very fast (less than 15 mins) and I didn't lose any data. Note that if your drive is full you won't be able to reduce partition size without losing data.
- On the laptop, disconnect the clock battery temporarily to reset BIOS
- Put the drive back into laptop and reboot. After going into BIOS to reset clock, etc. . . .Windows Startup Screen!!!
- Once booted use Disk Manager to create and format the new partition from leftover space
 
Can't tell you the number of hours this saved!  
 
BTW, I actually had to repeat some of the steps above a few times. Originally I resized the partition to ~135gb, but when I put it back in the laptop the BIOS  was still reporting the drive as 137 GB. So instead of messing around trying to get as close to 137 as I could, I just dropped the size down to 90 (don't need the space extra on this partition anyway).
 
THANK YOU for a great solution - hopefully others will find this thread before qiping out their drives!

Sorry it took so long to respond, the posts got lost.
 
The very first thing to do is to update your BIOS to the latest version. This in most cases will fix the problem. In other cases you will need to keep the primary partition under 137gb. One of those ways will fix the issue.

Sorry, Running XP Home,WiFi,With CELERON Processor. Or Should I go Back To Stock PC First?I Have All Original Hardware and Software. Thanks.

Did I upgrade to self destruct? 04'Dimension 2G RAM UP'ED to the MAX.Original harddrive. Can Iupgrade HDD and BIOS,Reinstall to fix? AIN'T SKEERD of INFO Loss. Do You Think It Will Work?

Yes, XP will support drives larger than 137GB but some computers may need their BIOS updated to accommodate this. If the BIOS was not setup to do this at boot time you can have many issues with large drives.
 
Also XP SP1 did not have support for booting drives larger than 137gb. XP SP2 does have this support.
 
(Message edited by Randem on June 22, 2009)

So there's no update for XP for drives larger than 137GB? We're forced to use partitions in this way?
 
Also, thanks for this post.
 
(Message edited by rosewater on June 19, 2009)

When I started getting this message lately and could not resolve it, all things pointed to a new motherboard and due to the age of the laptop that would have meant a new laptop. I had tried all the solutions of which NEVER worked before and even my old reliable solution; restore from a backed up drive image did not work this time. But I would not give up for I knew that this was a Microsoft error and they were not giving a clue on how to resolve it. I have found the solution for this issue and will now share it with all.
 
YOU DO NOT ABSOLUTELY NEED TO PURCHASE A NEW HARD DISK, THERE MAY BE NOTHING WRONG WITH YOUR HARD DISK!!!
 
I have had this error over and over again for the last few years but this time it was fatal. I was beginning a trip and then my laptop crashed with this infernal error. I have a backup imaged disk so I have been simply restoring the image and then copying over any updated files since the backup. However this time was different. I restored the drive and all and started my trip. When I got to my destination and attempted to use my laptop BOOM!!!; the error was back. So, I just restored again and updated again. This lasted until I turned the laptop off for the night and the very next morning, the error was back. Long story short, I did this routine a few more time and it eventually got worse until I just broke down a purchased a new bigger drive, I restored the image onto the drive and it worked for a little while until I rebooted. This went on for a few days while I was attempting to figure out what was happening. I searched the internet for a remedy to this issue but found not that would work in my situation. I had already tried everything that pertained to a laptop before the reset the BIOS, change the cables, and replace the drive. The only thing that always worked was to reformat the drive and this did not make any sense. But since I saw that many others were having the same issue I was relieved that it was not only me and my machine. So I set out to find the cure (at least for the type of problem I had).
 
I had an epiphany after failing so many times. Why would this only work after reformatting the drive, which was which all the other people would just parrot that you should do. Well, I will tell you why this works and why you don