Disk Read Error Occurred...new motherboard

ststarseed

Honorable
May 5, 2013
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10,510
I installed a new motherboard yesterday with a new CPU and new memory. After carefully connecting all of the components...hard drives, optical drives, etc....I powered the system on...and was excited to hear the POST beep. Then came the Windows XP splash screen, and I thought I was home free.

Alas...'twas not to be. About 15 seconds into the splash screen, the system completely shut down. I rechecked all of the connections and hardware...and discovered that I hadn't installed the new heatsink properly. After connecting the heatsink correctly, I restarted the system and received the dreaded "Disk Read Error Occurred" screen. The question, then, is this: How do I get past this screen and get Windows to boot? Here's the rest of the information I have that will, hopefully, help:

-The system has three hard drives. The drive with Windows on it (we'll call it the Windows drive) is a Western Digital 80GB drive, connected to the motherboard by SATA . The other two drives are 250GB drives (also Western Digital) and also connected by SATA. I have done the following with no success: Confirmed the BIOS was set to boot from the Windows drive...unplugged the two additional drives from the motherboard...changed the SATA cable...plugged the drive into each of the SATA connectors...nothing.

-The BIOS confirms the drive is alive.

-The board is an ASRock 880GM-LE FX.
 
Possibly when the system crashed it damaged the hdd which was in the process of reading. Boot from a boot cd/dvd and test the harddrive with asurface scan utility then I would run a full checkdisk on it for file system errors.