Well, this started when my hard drive had Win XP on it, so I guess this forum is as good of a place as any for this post. If it isn't, the mods can feel free to move it.

All right, here is the deal. Built myself a computer. All new parts, except for hard drive. I wanted to keep all the stuff on it, so I figured I could just hook it up to all the new stuff, and it would work fine.

Of course, it didn't.

When I start up, it gets to the part where it checks the PCI slots, and then I get this message:

A disk read error occurred. Press ctrl+alt+del to restart.

I was at a loss. I checked to see if the hard drive was still good by hooking it up as a slave to the computer I am on now, and it works fine. I looks through CMOS on BIOS and everything looked perfectly fine.

I copied everything from the hard drive that isn't working onto this hard drive. I reformatted the hard drive that wasn't working (while it was slaved up to this computer). Stuck it back in the new computer, and got the same error message.

Checked all the IDE cables, and everything. And I just can't seem to figure out the problem.

The motherboard is a Soyo P41875P, and the hard drive is a Quantum Fireball Plus AS.

So, any suggestions? Thanks a ton.

Welcome to PC Help Forum.com !

Interesting one this....

You say that you have completely transferred all of the data that you want to keep from the old drive onto the new(er) drive now?

If so then have you deleted the partition on the old drive prior to formatting it?

Thanks for the welcome!

Yeah, I got all the stuff I wanted from the old hard drive. Some of it is on this hard drive, and the rest I burnt to CDs.

However, I did not delete any partition on the old drive before I formatted it. As far as I know, I never partitioned it off.

Ok, whatever you had (an installation of XP) on the old drive would have had to have sat in its own partition. If you really want to get rid of this problem then you will have to FDisk the drive and create a new primary dos partition.

Are you ok doing that ? Would you like a tutorial ? Am I being patronising ? :wink: Seriously tho' if you have any probs with the partition then holler! Deleting the old partition is the only true way to "cleanse" it...

I have found that a good source of boot disks is Boot Disk.com (amazingly :wink: )

Ok, I will try doing that right now. I'll get back to you in a few.

All right, having some trouble. I would gladly accept that tutorial on using fdisk to delete the old partition. Maybe I am doing it wrong...I am running off the good hard drive with the not-working one as a slave. I opened up command prompt, and typed F:\, which switched to from C (the working hard drive) to F (the none working one).

Then I typed "fdisk", and didn't work. Said 'fdisk' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program, or batch file.

So, what am I doing wrong?

Also, I won't be able to run Fdisk on the new comp with the not working hard drive, because it gets the error long before I can get a command prompt going.