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I've recently been having problems with my home desktop pc (the one I use for Longhorn development), sometimes getting a “windows can't read from the boot disk; perhaps you need a new one?” type message whenever I try to get into longhorn or xp pro (after I make the selection on the boot menu). 

Day 1/Guess 1: Loose Ribbon Cable:
My first guess was the ribbon cable from the HD to the motherboard.  In the past, after long amounts of use (vibrations from drives A: through L:) can actually cause a ribbon cable to loosen itself from the socket, and disk errors will result.  Unplug and replug, and the machine's good for a couple more months (this has actually happened with more than one pc in the past; I must just have bad luck). 

Day 2/Guess 2: DVD:
When the next day the problem occurred again, I realized that perhaps it's the DVD in the drive I was trying to encode to my pocket pc.  So, I removed the disc from the drive, and it booted fine. I have had certain CDs, and DVDs (usually writable/ burned cds, although this one was a movie I had bought) cause the PC to lockup during boot, so this was not really that strange (albeit annoying).

Day 3/Guess 3: Card Reader:
By now, I'm getting really frustrated.  I have checked the ribbon cables, and a disc in the drive, both worked for 1 day, I can leave the machine on for 12 hours or so with no adverse effects, but if I leave the house and come back, ::poof:: can't read from startup disk. [A light goes on] Whenever I am removing the disc from a drive, or moving the pc to work inside it, I'm removing any USB stuff I have plugged into the front panel, including one Kingston memory card reader (which houses drives M: and N:).  Surely, it's not thinking this is a boot drive, is it? After a trip into the BIOS, I discovered to my astonishment “Generic Disk” inbetween my IDE chain and my RAID array.  So, unless this is another false lead, I believe the hardware problem is solved. 

Sometimes those fatal windows error messages are not what they seem from the initial cursory glance. Those black screen error messages are much worse than the blue screens!