Disk Read Error

[touficjohn]

Where to begin?

Well came home one day, booted up my machine and got, "Disk read error".
Thought i'd grab my XP cd fix the mbr and that would be it. No.
Fix, boot.ini. Nope because the hive is not supported on oem installs. Great.

Anyway I wanted to change the hard drive! So, ordered a 320gb Seagate barracuda from Scan.
Popped it in set the jumpers to master, put my XP cd in and started the installation.
Files copied over fine, format was fine, it rebooted itself to actually start the installation and I got the same error.
This lead me to think that there's something wrong with the new hard drive, put it in my other machine, ran the XP cd, formatted, rebooted and windows started to install without any problems!

I then pulled out one of my Linux hard drives and plugged into the problem machine and that booted up just fine.

So I put the new hard drive in the problem machine an tried again, this time the cd would'nt read.
As a result, I changed all the ribbons and all the cd-drives!

Tried again, the cd was reading again, copied the files over rebooted for the installation and was again presented with "disk read error press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart".

Its IDE, so there are no SATA drivers to install, and my XP cd has all the driver packs.
I've checked the PSU, seems to be fine, ran a memory test that passed so it doesnt seem to be the RAM either.

Could there be something wrong with the motherboard?
The machine is nearly 6years old...

Sorry for such a long post...
Any help would be greatly aprreciated!

[Viper81]

Sounds like your IDE controller may be on it's way out (just a guess). When you get the disk read error have you rebooted and had look in the BIOS to see if your drives are detected at all?

[Agent]

Its IDE, so there are no SATA drivers to install, and my XP cd has all the driver packs.

Try a normal XP CD with nothing integrated, Just in case its a rouge driver loading when it shouldn't or its corrupt.

[touficjohn]

Yeah, it shows ST13... etc etc
Also, I can browse the contents of the new drive, the files copied over by the XP installation in both windows PE and Knoppix...
So i guess its seeing it...

Try a normal XP CD with nothing integrated, Just in case its a rouge driver loading when it should or its corrupt.

Just tried it, did'nt work....
How do you fix/replace an IDE controller if its not PCI based?

[Agent]

You don't. If its gone on the motherboard, to use the correct technical term: You're knackered.

Very rare to happen though.

Other suspects could be PSU (They can make anything look wrong, as always) and Memory. I'd be looking at the latter for the time being. Do a memtest pass on it and see how it goes.

Do the read errors always happen in the same place?

[touficjohn]

Memtest passed... So I don't think its the RAM... I'll run another one...

PSU seems to be fine tbh any concrete way of telling if it too is knackered?

[Agent]

That was the fastest memtest known to man unless you've done it previously

PSU: Swap it with your other machine, although its unlikely to be that in all honesty. Its always worth checking though, thats the nature of troubleshooting

Are these on the same cable (the CD and HD?) or separate channels?
Double check the Master + Slave settings on each channel

[touficjohn]

Na, I did it previously...

They are on different channels, just checked the jumpers, they all seem to be fine too... *sigh*

Cant think of anything else really...

Thanks for all the help Agent

UPDATE:

I put a hard drive I wasnt using that had trixbox on it in the problem machine and tried to install XP on that hard drive, but the XP installation does'nt even reach the blue screens.
Press any key. Fine.
Setup is inspecting your hardware configuration. Fine.
Blank black screen. Left it for a good 5mins, nothing happens. Just hangs there.

What the hell is going on?

[peterb]

I had a similar problem with an IDE drive - which I eventually traced to the ribbon cable connector. Like most people I tend to pull on the cable to remove the plug (bad practice - but often the only way) and I had eased the back cover of the idc connections. Putting the connector in a vice (with suitable protection in thge jaws) and applying light pressure fixed the problem. Worth a try.