Greetings,

Today I had a power failure (I usually have one every week, and it just shuts my computer down and it comes back up fine after power returns.) This time though, i was in the process of closing a program and I'm fairly sure the disk was writing data at the time the power was cut.

When it rebooted, i got the "Data Read Error, please press CTRL-ALT-DEL" message. I had to head off to class but I am eager to fix this problem when i get home. Is it as simple as using the xp install disk to repair, or some sort of scandisk/norton program? Or is the drive hosed? It has basically all my important data (200gb drive) on it, and its a Maxtor. It is brand new and i have not yet made a backup.

Hope to find some good suggestions here, thanks for your time!

If you can boot into Safe Mode, try a System Restore first; if that doesn't work, try to do an In-place Upgrade:
http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...kb;en-us;315341

I can't get into safe mode, as the first thing that happens after my SCSI CD drives load is the "A data read error occurred" message. No XP logo or anything.

I've just tried using the XP CD to repair, after the "Setup is checking your hardware configuration..." message, just a blank black screen.

Will try accessing the drive as a non-boot drive.

Ok, the drive is fine, but cant be used as Drive 0, so I assume the boot sector is corrupted? How can i fix that?

Is your BIOS set to boot from CD? If it is, then I don't have any other ideas; unless someone else here has a suggestion, sounds like time to backup, format, and reinstall.

Boot to your Windows XP CD and once it loads, hit Enter to Setup Windows then select "R" to go to the Recovery Console. Once in, type FIXMBR reboot and try it.... not always a success

Hope this helps!!!

strangely enough, when that drive was set to drive 0, booting from the XP CD produced a blank screen only...

But that problem is long gone, after i gave up and just had that drive as drive 1, it started to fail in other ways. Whether it was a continuation of the previous failure or not, i cant say. However I'm able to get all my data off after using a technique i read about here w/ putting the drive in the freezer.

I forgot about it though and left it in there too long and it literally froze solid i think, was covered in moisture (even through double bags), and wouldnt work. Figured i destroyed it and i'd never get the rest of my data off, but after a day drying out, I'm at it again! Now to get it replaced via warranty (was a 2 month old drive)...

I've used the old freezer trick many times and it works.

For the record the command to use for a corrupt boot partition is not fixmbr, that fixes the Master Boot Record. For a corrupt boot partition it would be fixboot:

Writes a new partition boot sector to the system partition. The fixboot command is only available when you are using the Recovery Console

fixboot [drive]

Parameter

drive

The drive to which a boot sector will be written. This replaces the default drive, which is the system partition you are logged on to. An example of a drive is:

D:

Example

The following example writes a new partition boot sector to the system partition in drive D:

fixboot d:



Note

•Using the fixboot command without any parameters will write a new partition boot sector to the system partition you are logged on to.

To keep this from happening again, you should get a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply).

Additionally, you might want to consider just getting a new Power Supply for your system. If you had a power outage, you might have messed up your Power Supply, thus causing damage to your new drive. I'd consider that, as a decent power supply isn't too expensive.