Disk read error when booting on new mb?

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lizannel

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Hi all -
We got a new (used) motherboard (an Epox EP-3VSA) and since it's slightly faster than the old one, we put it in the box and mounted all the stuff from the old computer onto it - two WD hard drives, a CD burner, and a DVD player - nothing fancy. Turned it on and the BIOS says that all the drives are there. Then when it goes to boot up, it says "disk read error - press ctl-alt-del to restart". I checked to make sure that it's booting to the right hard drive, and it is. So I put in the Windows XP disk, ran the Recovery Console, and was able to log onto the hard drive with the Windows installation from there with no problem - I can see and "dir" all the drives. I ran chkdsk /p, and it found some errors and presumably fixed them and tried to boot again. Same error. Ran chkdsk again, this time with /r and then tried to reboot - still getting a disk read error. I don't know what else to check. Obviously it's able to read the hard drive when I boot from the XP disk, so why am I getting this error, and why won't it boot up, for pete's sake? I thought about running fixmbr or fixboot, but they won't make any difference if it's not reading the disk in the first place, right? Any advice or suggestions would be most appreciated!
 
Unlucky you.
Windows XP has security software that protects Microsoft. WXP will detect any changes in the motherboard, hard drive, or any other aspect of the computer except memory, and shut down because you are suspected of piracy.
You need to use your Windows install disk to install Windows in repair mode because it thinks it is being copied to another computer.
Some versions of Windows will not run the Repair mode, in which case you will need to reinstall Windows.
What is worse is that it will not work on the old motherboard now either.
 
Well, this is a new one one me. I know that WXP has the security thing going on, but I've moved lots of hard drives to other motherboards and usually what happens is that either it says that there is no operating system, or that the Windows installation needs to be repaired as you said. If you're really lucky then you just need to re-validate Windows. I've never gotten a message saying that there was an error reading the disk because of it, and that had me worried. Thanks for the info - guess I'll go and repair the installation now (sigh...)
 
I believe u will have to format and reinstall to get that error. I do not what causes it but I had that problem and the only way I got it to go away was to reinstall windows.
 
Yep, had to re-install Windows. Kind of a pain in the a** but it works now. And luckily, even thought it tells you that all files and folder will be deleted, I've never had that happen before and it didn't happen this time, either. So all is well.
 
Future Reference

lizannel,
For future reference if you know you are moving a hard drive to a new motherboard you can create an image first and then reload it on dissimilar hardware using Acronis. We had a trial and moved a laptop install to a dimension with no errors just as a trial.
I believe you can do the same thing using afree progam called "DriveImage XML
Image and Backup" of logical Drives and Partitions.
 
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