Very sorry if this has been asked, I did look around. My father has been having trouble with a “Frankenstein” computer he bought from a local shop that makes custom built machines. Other then the fact that it runs XP home I have no idea about the specs. From what I can tell the PC is full of spyware and likely a virus or two, it kept gettin slower and slower and eventually got to the point where it won't even boot up. Upon starting up the computer recently we received the dreaded Windows XP screen A Disk Read Error Occurred. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart. Restarted, fiddled with the BIOS, tried to boot from disk but I still get them same screen. Any help? Is there a better place I could ask about this at?
fidling with the bios isnt going to help. it sounds to me like the hard drive is knackered. try reinstalling windows but if your having read errors the drive isnt going to last a whole lot longer before it breaks again
what I would do is find out the make and model of the Hard drive. ALL the manufacturers of hard drives have free downloadable utilities that will fit on a floppy that you boot from. I probably do not have to tell you how to set your bios to boot from the floppy drive, sounds like you are an expert at working with the bios. Once you boot from the floppy they have utilities that will tell you the health of your hard drive ....IE, bad sectors, read errors ...etc
It's a well known Issue with XP - see http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/19004/ There are many suggestions on how to fix it, not all work for everyone unfortunately. I'm currently stuck with the same problems. Do not throw out the HD thinking it's faulty, it's probably not
I can't get the CD to start it goes right to the message. I've tried to boot through the BIOS but I can't get that to work either.
Shut down the PC --- put your finger on the DELETE key of your keyboard --- start your PC.. this should take you to the BIOS screen. Change the boot order to read Cd-ROM - Put your Windows XP Cd in and restart your PC !
Yes I tried that first thing when the problem started, thank you though. I belive something may be wrong with my CD-Rom drive as it was having trouble opening and closeing before this started anyway.
