A read disk error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.

Something is wrong and I have no clue what can it be...

I've first enabled AHCI without XP reinstall.
Worked just fine for a while but about 1 week ago, one morning, my computer was displaying a black screen with the "A read disk error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.".

After getting this error 3-4 times i've thought that it may be caused by the AHCI install without reinstalling XP so I did reinstall XP and enabled AHCI with the F6 method. I also installed JMicron controller (JMB36x - latest WHQL) with the F6 method.

So, fresh XP, AHCI enabled using F6, clean system and the error keeps showing.
I've googled a lot for this problem but seems that no one has a "solving" for this one.

Interesting thing, as i've observed till now, is that i don't get this error when i boot but just if my system is idle for some time.
If i work on the machine it doesn't crash even if i use HDDs a lot.

EX: I've left Norton 360 scanning all my drives but in the morning the error was on the screen again.
I've checked in the System Tools > Event Viewer > System and according to my "calculations" the error showed after Norton 360 finished scanning and my system was most probably idle.

Does anyone have any clue about this problem?


My system:

CPU:
Intel Pentium 4 540 - 3.20GHz (Hyper Threading) - L2 Cache: 1MB
MB:
Asus P5QL-E (P43/ICH10R)
HDD:
WD 320GB (WDC WD3200AAKS-22B3A0) - SATA II
Seagate 200GB (ST3200822AS) - SATA
Seagte 80GB (ST380817AS) - SATA
Optical:
NEC (_NEC DVD_RW ND-3520AW)
Asus (ASUS DRW-2014S1T)
Virtual Drive:
Daemon Tools Lite (HWL 527C5IRO1U SCSI CdRom Device)
RAM:
4x1GB Kingston HyperX (2 almost same dual kitts - KHX8500D2K2/2GN + KHX8500D2K2/2G)
Graphic Card:
Asus EN6600TD - 256Mb
Sound Card:
Creative Audigy 4 Pro (no drivers yet installed after this XP reinstall)
PWR:
Antec NeoPower 650 Blue
Enclosure:
Antec - metallic miditower (forgot the model name)
OS:
Windows XP Pro - SP2 (updated to SP3 + all other necessary updates)


Another strange thing:
On this new XP/AHCI install, using a Western Digital HDD Tool it says that my HDDs are okay - no error (same as Check Disk showed) but it shows my Seagate (SATA I) HDDs as being IDE and only the WD HDD (SATA II) as being SATA...

I wish to help you out but am not able to understand your post/problem exactly. Are you saying that XP is already installed on your system because you said above "first enabled AHCI without XP reinstall", and that "worked just fine for a while." This is making me confused because if you didn't install or re-installed XP how could it be working fine?

Apart from this, I have few more points that am not getting such am I right if I say that you are using non-RAID configuration or you changed the BIOS SATA configuration settings

Sorry if, because hurrying, my first post was not very clear and specific.

1.
a. No RAID
b. XP Pro (32bit) WAS installed on my computer. I've installed AHCI drivers in it without REINSTALLing the OS, following a simple method found on other forum.

My system worked fine with my old XP install for a while after enabling AHCI this way.

2.
I've reinstalled the OS and installed AHCI drivers using the F6 method but the "A read disk error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." error was not solved. Also, I've noticed that this error only appeared when my computer was idle. Not at boot. Not when working on the machine.


I found out that in Power Management my HDDs were set to be turned off after 20 minutes of inactivity. Setting "Never" for HDDs turn off in PM seems that solved my problem with the above error.

Now I'm monitoring my system because after this new OS install, before i got to install all necessary MS Win XP Updades (including SP3 / my XP disk only has SP2 included), i got bluescreen error that said "KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR".

I hope that this error is gone too as i've installed the latest Intel Matrix Storage Manager and installed some missing (idk why they were missing) drivers. I also set BIOS to allow XP to manage Play&Plug devices not required for boot.

*I also removed one of the four RAM bars and disabled "Memory Remap from 4GB to 3,28GB of RAM" feature in BIOS.

This is what I have done and now my system seems to work okay, but I'm afraid to set "turn off HDDs" option to any value than "never" in Power Management as it seems XP/AHCI drivers doesn't take it very well.
I will test this as soon as I'll be sure that my computer is working fine with current configuration and settings and I will post a reply here with the results.

Hope this information can be valuable for anyone that experienced this "disk read error" though having no defective hardware.

Last night I've tested setting my HDDs to turn off. Computer still working good . Went to sleep and turned it off.

This morning, at first boot, after Windows logon, computer crashed big time - bluescreen. First restart it said "missing system32/hal.dll". Second restart - crashed after i've clicked my username to logon.
Third to sixth restart - "A disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart."

Disabled JMB Controller in BIOS (this way my IDE DVDRW and HDDs are unavailable).

Computer restart - working good again.