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xJus10x

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 10, 2004
173
31
Ok, well my dads boss just gave me his work laptop and said it doesn't work and he had to go. So I have this Dell laptop and I turn it on and its a black screen that says, "A disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this, he really needs this laptop. And yes, I realize this is a mac forum, but I'm always on this site and have no clue to go for windows help =P Thanks!
 
xJus10x said:
Ok, well my dads boss just gave me his work laptop and said it doesn't work and he had to go. So I have this Dell laptop and I turn it on and its a black screen that says, "A disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this, he really needs this laptop. And yes, I realize this is a mac forum, but I'm always on this site and have no clue to go for windows help =P Thanks!


I can Redirect you to somewher for Windows help.

I can direct you to the planet where everyone dumps their PEECEES of there desks. Its called earth. Its happening as we type. Just kidding:D

you may want to go to:

http://www.freedomlist.com/forum
 
My dad had a similar problem.
His harddrive was shot.
What i'd recommend is getting an adapter to plug a laptop harddrive into a standard IDE interface on a PC. Radioshack might have them.

Then try using norton ghost or a similar utility to recover the data and back it up if windows won't let you read it right away.

This could be caused by a bad boot partition or the drive actually being dead i think. Hopefully just a bad/corrupt partition.
 
Thanks for the replies, if his hard drive actually is dead, what would he do? Send it back to Dell?
 
xJus10x said:
Thanks for the replies, if his hard drive actually is dead, what would he do? Send it back to Dell?

If it's under warranty, yes. They'll overnight you a new hard drive and you send the old one back. It's pretty easy too on most dells - On my mom's inspiron it was just two screws and it slid out the side.
 
Hard drive replacement on Dells are very easy in most cases. They are very cheap, consumer-level laptops, so they make those kind of repairs that are more common easier to do.
 
Definitely something wrong with the hard drive. If you want to spend the time, you could format and reinstall the os but that won't help with the data being lost. I work with pc's all day at work and I've never gotten one back up after seeing that error message.
 
yes there is definitly something wrong with dell laptops;)
now to convince him to get a mac.....
anyways, try what was suggested by the others, maybe even see if you can do a windows repair (via install disk if avail, I'm sure dell has this enabled), it may simply be a corrupt system file.
 
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