Take into consideration the following:
1) Check your hard disk for bad sectors (use thorough surface disk test…the one that takes a long time to finish).
2) If you’re using AsRock motherboard (Conroe 1333 and some Wolfdale 1333) some users in other PC hardware forums report it to be a recurrent problem in the SATA controller (probably also a problem of the southbridge)…mabilis daw masira yung SATA and others say it has compatibility problem with SATA drives and only IDE drives are stable with these mobos. I should know, I used to own an AsRock Conroe 1333 mobo that wouldn’t boot and manifest with the same “disk read error” message….despite re-connecting my SATA drives and even reformatting and re-installing Windows XP, it still manifested the same error message…tried using the SATA drives in my other PC and they worked fine. Tried looking for bad sectors using Windows XP’s built-in disk test and Norton’s disk surface test but found none. To cut the long story short…I’m still using those SATA drives but this time around, I got rid of the AsRock board and replaced it with MSI P31 Neo v2. All is running well and stable. I’m yet to experience that “Disk read error” message…so far so good.
3) My laptop manifested with disk read error before developing multiple bad sectors in its hard disk.
4) It can also be a SATA data cable loose connection. If you have extra SATA ports, try connecting your SATA HDD to those available ports to rule out possibility of a faulty SATA port.
If you've ruled out the possibility of a failing hard drive, then you might need a new motherboard. If it turns out to be a failing hard drive, then you need a new one.
