Hi -

I am trying to fix a Toshiba Satellite laptop that suddenly turned off one day and when it was powered back up, the error message "A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

That error message has not displayed all of the time though, twice I received an error message about ntoskrnl.exe being missing or corrupted and once I received a message about hal.dll being missing or corrupted.

I was able to get into DOS with a Win98 boot disk .. trying to access drive C brings up "Invalid Drive Specification"

I tried running Windows XP repair install, and it pretty much stopped when checking hardware.

The hard drive clicks .. and clicked VERY loudly as well as the laptop beeped at times while trying the repair install. I'm pretty sure (Well, I think) there was a power surge and the hard drive was damaged.

I found this link http://www.d-a-l.com/help/showthread...1&page=2&pp=10

Which describes my current problem .. but in the laptop there is NO option for AutoDetect (or if there is .. I'm blind and really missing it.)

Do you agree that it is the hard drive that is the problem? Or does it sound like the autodetect is wrong?

The laptop is from 2003 .. so it's only about 2 years old. I'm ready to replace the HDD if needed .. but I came across the link to another topic on the forum (linked above) and I thought maybe it was a alternate solution.

Thanks in advance for the help! =)

What is the exact model of the laptop?

The hard drive doesn't sound good but the beeps also indicate a BIOS level failure.

If you/we can look up the laptop or if you have the manual I would suggest finding:

1. The make of your hard drive in order to obtain the diagnostic.

2. A BIOS upgrade.

They were not Post beeps.. the beeps occurred while trying to install Windows XP .. I was half paying attention to it while it was running so it could have been the high pitched whirl of a poor lil damaged hard drive trying to run.

The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite 1415-S173. I am assuming the hard drive is a Toshiba, it is an Enhanced IDE ATA5. That's all Toshiba's specs on this laptop will tell me.

I can go for hours in DOS, boot up to A.. boot up to D.. anything but C.

Toshiba does not have its' own hard drive diagnostic but I see where Maxtor's PowerMax will most likely work on Toshiba drives:

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...&downloadID=22

Also in these pages from Toshiba you will find a BIOS as well as other utilities.

My thought on the BIOS Beeps was while XP was searching the hardware configuration & not detecting the hard drive it might have triggered these.
As that other thread pointed out there is quite possibly a BIOS problem resulting in varying conflicts with the hard drive.
Often I find this is resolvable with a BIOS upgrade & or reflash.

Prior to that step I would run PowerMax on your drive.

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/t...ceghdgngdgmm.0

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/t...odel&x=15&y=10

I'm sorry.. it IS a Toshiba hard drive. Toshiba MK3021GAS.

I'm running the PowerMax right now .. I'll post the results soon.

Thanks for your help so far.

Results were as I expected..

Soft reset test .............. Passed
Drive recal test ............. Passed
Drive identify test .......... Passed
Drive R/W Buffer Test ..... Passed
Check SMART Self Test ... Passed
Run SMART Self Test ...... Failed

Diagnostic Code: 6b699f7a
This drive is failing.

Try again ... just to verify ... did you try the long test?

Do you have valuable data you want to recover?

Also I would still suggest flashing the BIOS just to verify.

I cannot even get into Windows to the data if I needed to back up anything.
This is not my computer, I am helping someone fix it..so I don't know if they need valuable data.

I ran the long test three time .. and the second and third time it failed at the Drive recal test.

Which link is it to flash the BIOS? I went to Toshiba but there are many links there.

edit : found the flashing of BIOS .. but will it fit on a floppy diskette?

First off if you want to attempt data recovery you can put the drive on a desktop as slave to extract as per the following:

http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-1035_11-5160538.html

The BIOS is here:

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/t...ngdgmm.0&ct=DL

Package: WinZIP 32-bit self-extracting ZIP file includes both Windows-based and diskette based BIOS update installation options.
See the included README file for details.

I can't copy the BIOS to diskettes .. When I try, I receive an error message that says..
"Cannot find the file 1370D14.exe Make sure that the file exists on your system and the path and filename are correct."

I can see the file is right in the directory that it made .. but somehow it doesn't find it.