A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart

[fliptosideb]

alright, my hardware

motherboard: DFI 648FX-ALE: found here

Ram: 512MB

My problem is that I get "A Disk Read Error Occurred." on start up. Now I am posting this on the Motherboards category because the HDD I have will boot up on two other towers and the HDD boots with no error.

Now the story behind this this is, I got this machine for free from A friend because of this very same error. Now the tech side in me saw this as A great bargain because I thought that I can fix this easy...now a two weeks later of cleaning, formatting and rearranging...I still can't figure this out.

This is what i have done thus far:
swapped HDD
switched the automatic disk translation to LBA and to Large
flashed the bios
swapped HDD cords
swapped jumpers on the HDD
checked for faulty ram sticks

fun fact, I have even booted this machine up with flash drives containing DOS or Linux, with no problems
and i even can view/edit the files on the HDD through the flash drive's OS!

I have officially ran out of options on trying to fix this, and this is why i'm here.
any help will be appreciated and worst case scenario...I buy a new mobo.


Many thanks in advance, Nate

 

[danny2000]

It could be an IDE controller gone bad.
Did you try booting up from the both the primary and the secondory IDE controller?

Does your motherboard's bios support the size of the hard drive?

That is a very old motherboard so I would not spend much time on trying to salvage it.

 

[fliptosideb]

Both of the IDE controllers work I do think because i hooked both of them up to the CD drive and booted off of that just fine.

The HDD is A 80Gig, and when I installed Ubuntu to it, it was able to boot off of it but ran into start up errors after it booted.

so if it would be up to you, what would be a good cheep mobo that has at least 1 AGP slot on it?

 

[sonexpc]

If you can put this Hard drive in other machine..... try to check this Hard Drive in the other system ......you can download Crystal Disk Info ... and see the disk internal SMART Value...http://www.sonexpc.com/support/how/1/0001

for the worst case if the on board IDE error ... it just buy an add on card..

 

[SapientHetero]

My experience may not be relevant in all cases, but I just had this problem on a multi-drive desktop system running Windows XP Pro. I found that the boot priority had changed in the BIOS and my PC was trying to boot from a drive that was non-bootable. I fixed the boot priority so the drive containing XP was first and, viola, the problem was gone.

 

[fliptosideb]

it's the darnest thing ever ran into. I've just decided to scrap the old mobo and buy a new one for it. Thanks for all your guys help

 

[fliptosideb]

Best answer selected by fliptosideb.