Re: A Disk Read Error Occurred Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to Reboot


I have the same problem on a brand new machine. Whatever MS support
tells you is complete rubbish. Your RAM is not the problem. I know
what the problem is, but I haven't found a way to resolve it just yet.

Basically, Vista rewrites the partition table for your disk so that
what used to be the C drive prior to the upgrade is now seen as
something else. In my system I have 4 drives, 3 of which are SATA, and
my boot drive is IDE. When Vista reboots, it automatically enables
AHCI, which on my machine results in all of the drives appearing to the
system in a different order than if AHCI is not enabled. So what
happens in my case is my IDE drive is no longer appearing as the master
boot device, even though the BIOS is configured for it to be.

I believe the Boot Sector of the disk and/or MBR has to be manually
edited to tell Vista where the OS installation is located.
Unfortunately, this is not a layman level of activity. So far I have
validated that my disk contains the Vista installation and has the Vista
boot loader files installed, but I haven't been able to figure out how
Vista identifies the boot device and partition yet. If I can figure
that out, I should be able to edit the disk so that Vista knows where to
fins the boot loader.

On a side note, if I do a clean install instead of an upgrade, it works
fine. This appears to be a problem only when upgrading because
something about the disk manager assignment of drive letters to devices
gets hosed when doing the upgrade installation. By the way, I had the
same problem when upgrading my XP from service pack 2 to service pack 3.


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druedger
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