Yesterday I awoke to find my PC wasn’t really responding to any input. Any attempt to bring up the Windows XP task manager took 5 minutes, so I attempted to close all applications but it reset after being non-responsive for a couple minutes. On reboot, I get the lovely message:
A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart
I turned the machine off to let it cool and later opened up the case to clean out any dust and check the SATA cables to ensure they were secured to the hard drive. I just built this computer in February so I was kind of ticked the Seagate 500gb drive was failing after only nine months. On the next boot, XP went through CHKDSK, fixed a few minor errors, and the operating system opened as normal. Immediately, I backed up my documents, bookmarks, and the most important to an external hard drive (also Seagate…):
xcopy e:\music\* f:\ /D /E /F /R /Y
Then today, I find mouse/keyboard input is being delayed randomly and audio is crackling on hard drive activity. So this now seems to be point this to be a Asus P5B motherboard problem, since it has on-board audio. So I moved the USB cables to plugs further from the audio jacks and removed the SATA controller drivers under Control Panel » System » Hardware » Device Manager » IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers and then re-added them by rebooting. For now, the issue seems to be fixed, but I fully expect my system to fail before the year ends. Happy holidays, arsehole!
