Hi Guys,

I am running a virgin installation of XP with SP2 with an Athlon 750 & 512Mb RAM.

Everything has been running fine after my installation a couple of weeks ago, until today.

Upon reboot I am seeing "a disk read error has occurred, press ctrl-alt-del".

This is an almost new Hitachi Deskstar HDD 250GB - about 3 weeks old. Here's the confusing issue though - if I change my boot sequence to boot from CD, when trying to boot to the windows Cd i get the same message! ... so it won't even start booting to the CD. "searching from boot record" is ok, then I see the "a disk error..." message.

If I disconnect all hard drives and leave only the CD connected, windows will start to run setup. When I reconnect my hard drive, I get the error message again.

I have other computers and drive enclosures which I can connect this drive to if need be, I'm just not entirely sure how to proceed as I am not too experienced with the finer points XP. Been using ME until recently.

Seeing as it's a new drive (heard no nasty noises) I am wondering if my MOBO is going bad. It's a pretty old FIC SD11 (my backup computer).

Edit : I just put the suspect device in an enclosure and it spun up fine, and I was able to browse all my files. So maybe either something is corrupted, or the MOBO is the problem?

I just removed the drive and ran full chkdsk on it . No errors were reported. Replaced it back in the original computer, booted from HD, same error. booted from Cd, same error. Tried a few more times, eventaully started the R console, ran fixboot, rebooted to CD and HDD, both still give me the same error. All the files are intact still.

I just ran into the same issue. XP ran great for 2 days then data read error on boot. I have an Intel D845GEBV2 mobo and a Barracuda 7200 hd. I ended up having to use a 40-pin 80-conductor IDE cable. Many of these cables have a blue tip on the end that plugs into the mobo and what looks like a small hole in the ribbon cable as a cable detect mechanism. A visit to your mobo's manuf.'s website may possibly confirm your need for this type of cable. Hope the suggestion helps!