Disk Read Error after hard shutdown

I'm running Vista Ultimate 32bit on my HTPC. Every now and then my system hangs and it leaves me nothing more than to do do a hard shutdown (hold down the power button for 4 seconds). However, now when I want to start my machine again, it hangs when trying to boot up and after 10 seconds it pops up a message saying there's a "disk read error".

Now here's the weird thing: repeatedly trying to reboot is still yields the "disk read error", but leaving the system off for an hour or so and then rebooting it oftentimes results in a successful boot.

Anyway, this is driving me crazy! I know I shouldn't do a hard shutdown, but sometimes the whole thing hangs and I cannot do anything else!

Is there anyone who has a solution for this? I've been Googling around and the "disk read error" seems to occur a lot with Vista. Maybe I should switch back to XP...?

Pascal.

Hi Pascal,

Welcome to Vista Forums.

It sounds like you may have some corruption on the drive. I would run Check Disk to see if can find and fix any corruption that may be on the drive.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/67612-checkdisk.html

Shawn

Hi Brink,

Thanks a lot for the warm welcome!

Thanks for your referral. What makes this problem actually rather annoying is the fact that I have the HTPC connected to my tv via HDMI. However, I (obviously) only get a picture when Vista is started, so it's a great pain to have to run Vista recovery, since that involves walking around the house with monitors and stuff and hooking them up. I was kinda hoping there is a way to prevent having this problem from actually happening. E.g. some setting that make sure that write actions to the drive always get committed "quickly" and that whatever happens al least the MBR does not get affected! Is there something I can do in the prevention space?

I rarely ever got an error like this after a hard shutdown in XP. I get the feeling that Vista is less reliable in this area. I don't know if anyone can confirm this.

As for my current situation: I decided to reinstall Vista yesterday, since I was having some other problems as well. Hopefully that will get rid of the freezes and thus for the need to do a hard shutdown.

Cheers,

Pascal

Pascal,

I hope that solves your problem too.

Shawn

You may also want to look at creating an Ultimate Boot CD. Based off of Barts PE Builder. This is one of the handiest tools in my shed. I've repaired many a windows "no boot" with this gem.

Ultimate Boot CD - Overview

Thanks for the tip, Vantim! I'll check it out.

Pascal.

Have you consider this may be an overheat issue?

Not really, since I monitor my CPU and case temperature rather frequently and they never really exceed 40 degrees Celcius (104 degrees Farenheit). Why do you reckon this might be the case?

Pascal.

The way your computer hung up every now and then seems to be heat related. Also, nothing will repair itself in a computer while the power is off except heat problem.

There is a possibility of that your psu and/or HDD going out although your cpu temp is ok.

Is there a fan on the front penal blowing air to the HDDs needs to be clean up? Also, you can put you hand on the back of PSU to see if the air coming out of it really hot?