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When i start my system it says 

A disk read error occurred. 
Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart.

I had simply made three partitions and copied the files using the XP setup(Installation didn't complete it just copied the files) this comes before windows is installed

I had just received this drive after RMA, and even the disk utility in Ubuntu says "Disk is healthy"

Any suggestions?

@brian

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk /dev/sda1

Command (m for help): m
Command action
   a   toggle a bootable flag
   b   edit bsd disklabel
   c   toggle the dos compatibility flag
   d   delete a partition
   l   list known partition types
   m   print this menu
   n   add a new partition
   o   create a new empty DOS partition table
   p   print the partition table
   q   quit without saving changes
   s   create a new empty Sun disklabel
   t   change a partition's system id
   u   change display/entry units
   v   verify the partition table
   w   write table to disk and exit
   x   extra functionality (experts only)
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1 Answer

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The first boot drive it finds doesn't have any partition marked as active. So make sure the bootable partition is marked as active and the drive it's on appears in the boot device list before any non-bootable hard drives.

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I used this command on ubuntu fdisk /dev/sda1 to mark it active but still I get the same error.. And I have only 1 drive installed – Nikhil Bhandari Dec 7 '11 at 15:50
And I am not sure that the change that I made marked my partion active can you help me with that? I have ubuntu 11 on my USB disk.. Thanks – Nikhil Bhandari Dec 7 '11 at 15:56
Use ‘m’ to modify active flag then press w to store the modification. – Brian Dec 7 '11 at 16:08
I have updated the question have a look :) – Nikhil Bhandari Dec 8 '11 at 0:50
'a' should do it. Then use 'p' to see the new table which should have the partition in question marked active/bootable in some way. Then 'w' to write it to disk. – Brian Dec 8 '11 at 6:04

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