Hi,
This will be a long story but here we go!
While on the internet everything froze and nothing seemed to help except the RESET button. After pushing that button and a reboot came the "A disk read error occurred" message.
I had two hard disks (which are on the same IDE cable) in the PC:
1. a 80GB Maxtor which was my primary drive (Master)
2. a 6 GB Seagate which was my secondary drive (slave). This had been my master drive sometimes 3-4 years ago and I had WIN2K installed on it but in the present configuration I used it as an extra storage place.

After many tries and the same end results, I tried to boot from my WIN XP cd and repair the disk or at least check it but it would refuse to start XP installation. The only time it started the XP installation was when I had both hard disks removed from the PC. And then of course the installation stopped and told me that I had no hard drives installed :x.

I tried to switch the drives around or booting with only on drive (jumpering was checked in each case so the Master and Slave were correct) but it would either not detect the drives (when 6GB drive was Master) or get the "A disk read error occurred" message when the 80GB drive was master. When I had the 6GB drive as single master, I got a message which said that a kernel*.dll ( iam not sure if I remember the name of this file correctly) and I should reinstall it, but how? when I could not get to a DOS or windows command line.

So I could not get to the XP installation or the DOS prompt.

I took my 80GB drive to a friend to see if his system would detect that drive. It detected it but you could not see the contents of the disk. I borrowed a working hard drive from him and when I connected it to my PC I still got the same message "A disk read error occurred" :cry:
I even changed the IDE cable but that did not help either.

Then I took the 6GB drive to a friend and formatted the disk. I connected this disk to my PC and I got another message "NTLDR missing", press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart.
I downloded the XP boot disks (from Microsoft) and tried to boot from the floppy disk but still got the "NTLDR missing" message.

So now I do not know what the hell to do and any help would be appreciated.
If I am slow in responding the reason will be the fact that I do not have an internet connection at home (BECAUSE MY PC IS SICK :cry!

WIN XP (SP1)
AMD Athlon +2100
MSI KT3V motherboard

Cheers

Have you tried resetinf the CMOS? On the mootherboard should be a battery a little bigger than a battery battery, remove it, keep it out for about 30 seconds and put it back in. Also are you telling the Bios to boot from the Cdrom?

- No, I have not tried removing the battery. I will try it next.
-I tried resetting the BIOS to factory settings but that did not help either.
- Yes I did tell the BIOS to boot from CD-rom but that did not help.

Thanks for the suggestions, I will let you know what happens.

Cheers

Also found this seems just like the problem your having


http://www.bestpricecomputers.ltd.uk...dr_missing.htm

Thanks for the link.
The problem with that link is that I can not start the XP recovery utility or get to a DOS prompt in the first place.
Now I will try using a different RAM or video card, maybe one of them or both are the problem!

Obtain a fully working copy of XP then go here and read this carefully.

XP Clean Install