"A disk read error occured" - can't boot my PC.

Hello all,
My PC hard-crashed this evening, and when I booted it back up, I received the following message immediately after the initial BIOS loadup -
"a disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart".
I went back into the BIOS to make sure my boot drive (A Kingston 64GB SSDNOW) was recognized - it was, and it was set as the first (and only) boot device.
I decided to try a simple test and switched around all my SATA connections on my motherboard to different spots. Then, when I rebooted my computer, I don't even get that error message - it goes past the BIOS straight to a black screen and hung there. This occurred for several reboots in a row, until I just tried it again after typing this and it's back to the "a disk read error occured" error message.

So my question is - is there something wrong with my hard drive, my hard drive cable (easier to diagnose), or is it just my windows installation? Should I bother trying to reinstall windows and testing it out, or should I just go get a new SSD?

Thanks guys! You are, as usual, the best.

Hm. So I switched out the SATA cable to my SSD for my CD Drive's cable, put the SSD in another slot, and gave it a different power input cable. My PC has now agreed to boot.

Should this give me confidence that my SSD itself is ok, and that something else was causing the issue? I'm ok to put this thread on ice until such time as the problem reappears.

I would suggest making an immediate image backup if you have the space available. That could be a dying drive. The flash-based drives are supposed to be highly reliable, since they have no moving parts, but all electronics can fail.

It's probably not your Windows install, because you're getting the error message so early in the boot process; the BIOS isn't able to either locate or read from the drive. It could be a cable, could be a port, could be the drive itself, but it's probably not Windows.

Since you've now changed both cables and ports, if you see it again, it's most likely the drive. Could potentially also be something amiss in the controller chip on the motherboard.

You might want to run a SMART utility to see what the drive is reporting about itself. Intel provides a nice tool for its drives, so Kingston may have some equivalent utility you can run. If it's complaining about errors, finding out what kind would help with the diagnosis.