I've been trying to install a new primary hard drive on my older computer, and I'm constantly getting a "disk read" error. The drive was completely new and unformatted, and I connected it and tried to install Windows XP on it. Windows Setup formatted the drive, went through the first round of copying installation files, and told me that I would need to reboot to complete the installation. The problem is that after rebooting, it tells me, "A disk read error has occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." The only way to avoid this is to boot from the installation CD, which only starts from the beginning and tells me that it will overwrite the partially-completed installation.

Hooking it up as a secondary drive (in an enclosure) to my newer computer is the only thing that works. The BIOS in the older computer sees the drive. SeaTools doesn't see anything wrong with it. Doing a full erase in SeaTools doesn't help. I checked the jumper settings and the boot sequence, and there is no other hard drive connected that it could possibly being trying to boot from instead. Anyone know what else there is to check?

Thanks in advance.

Is the HDD the Primary Master and the CD drive the Secondary Master?

If not that would be the first thing I would change.

Google offers a wide range of speculation on the error:

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...isk+read+error

and

http://groups.google.com/groups?sour...=1&sa=N&tab=wg

Thanks. I'm pretty sure that the HDD is set as the primary master, but as I'm not home right now, I can't confirm it right now. I've also looked on Google a little bit but haven't come across anything yet. The results I've seen had to do with always getting that error. I only get the error after the first portion of the XP installation, not after the drive has been freshly formatted or in the BIOS or in SeaTools, but I'll look some more.

Thanks again.

You said that this was an older computer? What kind of condition are the IDE cables in and try switching RAM too, if possible. I had a similar problem and my issue turned out to be bad RAM.

Already tried it with a brand new IDE cable with no success, but I'll try changing the RAM.

Thanks.

Any other ideas if it doesn't turn out to be RAM?

Ensure the bios setting for the hard disk is set to AUTO, and not NORMAL. You may have to set it to LBA depending on the disk and the bios.