A disk read error occured: Ctrl+Alt+Del restart

Hi all, I have a big problem in that I am nolonger able to boot into Windows. My laptop is a slowly dying Acer 7520 Aspire with a 320GB Western Digital SATA drive. It was all working fine (apart from the few known hardware failures) until one day I booted it up to play descent and it hung on the desktop, I think this may have been after the system went into hibernation due to low battery. Hard rebooted it only to find the thread title "disk read error". I fear this is a complete HDD failure and is not recoverable although the drive is still listed in the BIOS. I have alot of data on the harddrive which I would like to retrieve, most drawings and music.

I have tried booting from an XP cd to see whether I can get into the recovery console but all I get is a error telling me that now HDD have been detected.

I guess the last line of action I can take is to buy an external caddy and see whether I can recover my data via another computer or even use norton ghost or the likes.

Sorry if it's a bit vague, any ideas?

I might aswell mention that 2 usb ports and the Ricoh flash stick drive are nolonger usable, they just don't detect anything that I put in and on the odd occation when they do, they always fail to install the drivers.

Immediately remove the drive from the system to avoid data loss.

Put it in another machine, and see if you can copy the files from it. Do not write to the disk any more, or try to boot from it.

No. DO NOT even power on the drive again until you are ready to copy all the data over.

Your drive is on the verge of failure. You never know, it could die completely the next time it spins up. It's not worth the risk.

Plus disk testers don't help anything in this case. You already know the drive is failing; you don't need a program to tell you that again. :)

I have a 160GB external hard drive which is my primary backup so I'm pretty much ready for retreiving any files I can, but Until then I've placed the drive in a safe location :) thanks for the advice, will get back to you later during the week

Ok I've got my caddy and put the Hard drive in, but Explorer is taking ages with it plugged in and keeps crashing which is unusual for it. Took round a friends who's got a faster PC and tried accessing the drive to backup my files only to have the "Format this disc" message displayed. System properties displays the disk as having 0KBs/0KBs. I guess I'm too late to recover anything from this. That's another new hard drive I gotta buy now.

Have you backed things up, so you don't have to start from scratch?

Yeh, but it's a few months old :S BTW, I downloaded Piriform's Recuva software and it was able to see all files and I have started to recover them! All files are coming up as green and preview shows all pictures. I'm hoping that the data integrity is also OK, otherwise I could be looking at a corrupted recover. Hope all goes well with it, will keep you updated.

I'm wondering whether when I've got this backup whether it's worth formatting the drive after and installing Windows again?

Ok, recovery went very well. I now have most of what I had on that Hard drive safe on my backup drive. Though some tunes didn't make it. I tried deleting the partitions and then installing windows on the harddrive but it won't format the drive, the percentage doesn't budge and in the Windows mangement console, it doens't display a percentage it just displays Formatting :/ I guess that means a new hard drive then...

Thankyou for your support, Thanks Jonathan & LW7 for your advice

No problem. Thanks for reporting back.

Let us know if you need anything else.