Blinking Cursor, or “Disk I/O Error”, “A Disk Read Error Occurred”, or “I/O Error Reading Disk” Error Message
This article addresses the following issues, which can occur when attempting to boot from a partition which had been copied or restored using BootIt BM:
- Nothing but a blinking cursor in the upper left corner of the screen.
- "Disk I/O error" error message.
- "A disk read error occurred" error message.
- "I/O error reading disk" error message.
These problems can result if the following conditions are true:
- You are not using BootIt BM to boot the partition.
- The "Use HD0 in BPB" setting was not enabled at the time of the copy/restore.
- The destination drive was not HD0.
The problem is that the BPB points to the incorrect hard drive. To solve this problem, do any one of the following:
- Boot BootIt BM, enable the "Use HD0 in BPB" setting, use Partition Work to view the properties of the affected partition and answer the "Correct BPB HDNum" question with a Yes.
- Enable the "Use HD0 in BPB" setting and copy or restore the partition again.
- If the platform is DOS, Windows 9x, or Windows Me, boot with an OS startup diskette and issue the following command: "sys c:" where "c" is the drive letter of the boot partition in question.
- If the platform is Windows NT, run the Windows NT setup program and select the "Inspect Boot Sector" option.
- If the platform is Windows 2000 or Windows XP, boot into the Recovery Console and use the "fixboot" command. More information on using the Recovery Console can be found in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base articles: