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Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck! I spent much of yesterday through the current wee hour of this morning sorting, archiving, and backing up files from my Windows Vista workstation and otherwise preparing to downgrade to Windows XP (I will likely write more about my reasons for that later) and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the horrible Windows XP installer actually recognized my Serial ATA hard drive. Unfortunately, after the Windows installation was underway and the installer rebooted the system for the first time so installation could continue from the hard drive, I was greeted with two non-specific, but still ominous lines: "A disk read error occurred" and "Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". I did so, but to no avail; the same messages reappeared. And again.
Windows Vista has a vastly superior installer compared to Windows XP; it is too bad things go downhill after the installation process ends and actual system use begins.
Update (8:01am): Changing a single BIOS setting for my hard drive—"Access Mode" on my Asus M2A-VM mainboard—from "Auto" to "Large" seems to have done the trick for me, but it didn't take effect immediately upon rebooting; the system halted with the same two error messages exactly as it had before. Reinstalling Windows XP, however, then resulted in a properly bootable system. It seems then that the root problem was probably something during the installation process.
