Boot error: 'a disk read error occured'

[hopperdave2000]

....that's the message I get immediately upon booting up. First the COMPAQ 'post' screen, then the error message. The HD is brand new and contains a ghosted WinXP Home. All the OS and data files are there, but it won't boot. I've tried chkdsk, fixboot, fixmbr.... I'm gonna try to reload 'over the top' but I'm pretty sure that won't fix anything.... the HD that was ghosted was failing but it still booted about 60% of the time; it's making the most god-awful sound at power up: like a small child shrieking... seriously! It'll scream for 2-3 seconds and then it'll boot to WinXP or it'll lock up right away. Is there a chance that the new HD is permanently damaged by ghosting this failing drive to it??? Any other ideas or suggestions will be greatly appreciated! THANX!

hopperdave2000

PS- If anyone has any ideas, I'm a bit pressed for time on this so sooner is better than later

[studiot]

Grrr just wiped my answer getting the radified link so I'll have to remember/retype it.

Compaq put a small OEM partition at the beginning of XP disks. This means that the Ghost image you did includes the wrong boot .ini for a disk without this partition. So you need to edit the boot.ini partition() entry. Try reducing it by 1.

To learn all about Ghosting XP see

http://radified.com/index2.html

Studio T

[hopperdave2000]

I re-wrote new, clean boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com files to C: and still the error. I'm running chkdsk /r on the old failing drive now, and I'll do a fixboot/fixmbr on it also. Then I'll try to image again to the new HD. Hopefully this will fix any errors on the old drive long enough to get a clean image copied over.

hopperdave200