I know this is a common thing in forums across the internet. Everyone seems to be having this "A disk read error occurred" problem. But mine is a bit different from all the other circumstances I've found...
This first happened to me two months or so after I built my computer. I, of course, figured I had done something wrong. So I formatted, checked to make sure everything was properly installed, etc., and to the best of my knowledge, it was (and still is). About two months later, it happened again. After another formatting of the drive, it happened again in two or so months.
This continued to happen about 7 or 8 times until I could save up enough money to buy another HDD. So I did. My old one was Seagate, my new one is Western Digital. Everything seemed to be working great. But then...
Yes, it has happened again. Except now I have a more extensive knowledge of recovering computers (after all these problems, you would think I would). In scanning the forums yesterday and today, I've done the following (not in this order):
- Let Windows XP try to fix itself.
- Gone into the recovery console and run chkdsk /r, fixmbr and fixboot
- Reseated the HDD itself.
- Changed the IDE cable out (several times with several different cables, just in case)
- Updated the BIOS
- Run a diagnostic on the HDD (The drive is FINE)
- Tried changing a few of the settings on the HDD itself in the BIOS (Nothing changed anything)
- Changed the jumper on the HDD to just Single/Master rather than Cable Select.
- Taken out my RAM (I have two 256s in there) one by one to see if maybe one was messed up somehow.
- Taken out my Ethernet card (it had been giving me trouble in the couple of days before this happened, saying that the drivers needed to be installed, though they had been installed for months prior and the card had been functioning properly)
One more thing I should mention: there is no common factor as to when this happens. There's no one thing that I do that always causes this; it just seems to randomly happen.
Please, any other methods of solving this, let me know! If you have any questions about anything else about my computer, please ask. I'm quite good with computers and know what all my hardware is, etc. But this just baffles me. I thought I repaired this when I replace my HDD.