A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart

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I decided to stretch my budget and treat myself to a 280x and everything was going swimmingly until my Motherboard seems to have developed a problem moments after installing it.

I have or had a Gigabyte Z77 D3H and when I initially whipped out my old 6850 and put in the 280x everything seemed OK. I used the AMD tool to remove the old driver rebooted and that's where the problem began. It wouldn't boot into windows, instead giving me a “Disk read error has occurred” message. After pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del I eventually got back into windows installed the drivers rebooted again and that was it I couldn't get it to boot into windows after that.

Initially I thought graphics card was to blame so removed that & went with the on-board one, I also thought my SSD may be to blame as the system posts and the board recognises the SSD but I got an “reboot and select proper boot device” message at this point so I tried reinstalling windows but while it gets through the initial install once it reboots to complete the installation I get the disk read error again.

I then tried clearing the cmos, using different SATA slots, cables and another Hard drive. I even moved the RAM trying it 1 stick at a time in different slots but nothing. Eventually I gave in and thankfully I had a spare H61 motherboard (sad hoarder) which I decided to try and everything works so I'm 99% sure my Motherboard is faulty. I'm just a little bit suspicious that this happened the moment I tried a new graphics card and well that purchase has me tapped out so I can't really afford to replace the board so I'm wondering if there's anything I may have missed?
 
The boot order was correct and I'd press whatever button it was to manually select boot device to be sure. Might give the beta BIOS a go, Thanks.
 
did you try booting from windows dvd and do startup repair?

idk if the driver removal tool might have messed up the boot partition?
 
did you try booting from windows dvd and do startup repair?

idk if the driver removal tool might have messed up the boot partition?

I did but it couldn't even find my Window install :confused:

Anyway I tried reinstalling the OS from scratch but kept running into the same problem.
 
you get that sometimes with installs,it doesn't boot from the dvd drive to finish the install

could try latest bios I guess,idk whatelse it could be
 
If I understand it correctly Windows boots from the USB or DVD and installs stuff onto the SDD/HDD then reboots and should now boot from the SDD/HDD and that's where the problem seems to be it's like it can no longer read from SATA drives.
It could just be all be an unrelated coincidence and it was gonna happen anyway, it's just I wish it had happened before I splashed out on such an expensive graphics card. :(
 
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Installing with just the SSD/HDD attached and the disk drive with the media in can help.

If you have a second HDD attached random file I think I read somewhere can be put on the 2nd drive.
 
Yeah whenever I have problems I always go for the minimal hardware necessary for the system to work and then add things back in, so at that point I only had the SSD, Windows USB drive, 1 stick of RAM and obviously the CPU.

Right now I'm thinking I just put a new cheap Z77 board on my credit card and be done with it as I just can't motivate myself to go through it all again.
 
If you really do think the board is at fault then RMA it, it has a 3year warranty and if the supplier you got from doesnt help Gigabyte UK are based in Milton Keynes.
 
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