"a Disk Read Error Occurred"

Believe me, I know how terrible it feels when you lose your data/HDD!

Anyway, did you just change your HDD?(Hard Disk Drive).

If YES,then the problem it that the BIOS on the computer your are using cannot read large partitions on your hard drive. I guess you get the error message even before the windows startup screen?

To get around this, begin the installation again but this time,  create a primary partition of 8,057MB for Win2000 or 2,048MB for WinNT/XP, and format the rest of the hard drive after you have installed the OS.


If NO, then its probably a physical/mechanical fault to the disk(bad sectors). It's adviceable to get a new HDD and use any of the numerous free Disk utilities you can get on the internet(I recommend Hiren 9.0) to salvage any data left.(These utilities "somehow" read over bad sectors).

Okay, the Hiren comes as a Cd image file(ISO). You'll need to burn it onto a CD using any cd burning software:(Alcohol120%, Nero, Daemon Tools, Sonic).
Once you have it burnt onto a cd, it autoruns.
Follow these steps:

1. Shutdown your PC and connect the faulty HDD to it and restart.
2. Boot normally into windows and start the Hiren software from the CD
3. From the options screen that comes up next, click on

• ]"GetDataBack NTFS" if your previous filesystem on the HDD was NTFS
• "GetDataBack FAT" if the filesystem was FAT/FAT32

4. The next screen allows you select which HDD to recover from. Pick the faulty one.
5. On the next screen, select "Search Entire Drive". It then swings into action. Allow it run till the end after which you'll be presented with a list of files that were recovered.
 Select the ones you need and save them to the other good HDD. don't try saving onto the faulty one or else,

Formatting a HDD does not wipe your data. All that happens is that is re-writes the MBR and re-initializes the MFT entries(address tables) on the disk. Your data is STILL on the disk only this time they are not indexed as valid.
If you want to recover a file from a faulty drive, make sure that even after formatting, you don't save any data onto the disk. This protects the integrity of the data previously on the drive.

Cheers.

The boot diskette loads only enough tools for system diagnosis. Depending on how the boot diskette was created, you'll mostly be limited to the windows installation directory. Your files are still on the disk.

Advanced boot disk can be created that give access to the files on the drive even if the windows installation wont start.