Disk Read Error on booting XP

[Guest]

My son's PC has died, I re-built it earlier this year and it was fine until
this week. After initial bios screen it reports disk read error. Have:

1. Checked in bios; all looks ok, disk is being recognised.
2. Have run chkdsk /r; it reported that it had repaired the disk.
3. Have run fixboot
4. Have tried repair; no errors reported when copying file over, but still
reports read error on rebooting.

Still getting nowhere and do not want to do full install as he has not
backed up any of his material and I have no way of extracting his data onto
my machine.

Was balding to start with but now as shiny as a bowling ball.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

 

[jimvernon2003]

Well, you can take out his HD and put it into your machine (if you
don't have any available IDE, just unplug your CDROM temporarily and
use that for the HD) and copy the files over

OR

You can do an install of XP on that machine and just don't format the
drive. XP should install right over everything that's there and leave
his docs/apps alone.

 

[jimvernon2003]

Might also want to remove any floppy/cd disks that are in the machine
and try booting up.

 

[Guest]

Have managed to gain access to the hard disk but cannot get it to act as boot
disk in his PC.
Put spare hard disk in his PC and installed XP. Can boot from that and have
full read write to old disk but still cannot get old disk to function
properly.

 

[S. Taylor]

It sounds like the MBR or Partition (or Partition Table) has been damaged.
Back up all his data first, then use your favorite search engine to find
a freeware app to repair them ( Master Boot Record, Partition Table).
The MBR is the most likely problem.