A Disc read error accurred press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

Hi, this is my first post and i am not very good with computers so please bare with me.
If anyone could please help me i would be so grateful, as the only person who can help me (who i live with is in hospital and i have no idea when he will be coming home) and i really need my laptop working.

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1300 and i have had it for a few years (not sure exactly). the only thing that me and my dad have done to it is add more memory.

OK a couple of days ago, i decide to take everything ( i wanted to keep) of my laptop so i could restore it back to its factory settings. i then restarted my computer and pressed Ctrl+F11 which takes you too the restore to factory settings page (thats what i had read, so thats what i did). it asked me if i still wanted to restore or to reboot, i chose RESTORE. i pressed restore and confirmed it. once i had confirmed a bars came up and was loading. after that had finished loading, a box came up reading -

The system recovery process was NOT successful.

CAUTION: Do not manually shut down your computer. click finish button to reboot.

so i followed the instructions and pressed finish, but it rebooted and then came up (with this really annoying message) -

Loading PBR for descriptor 2...done

A disk read error occured
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

i have done that so many times. As this would not work me and my brother (who is not good with computers also) tried finding the solution. but could not find anything.

if you plz have any suggestions. i have read that it could be the hard drive but i dont think it is (well i hope its not). i did have an idea that it could be the memory that i had added. however i am not sure as i dont understand computers.

Please help this useless person with computers as it is my life line:cry

i hope to here from someone soon.

 

go into the bios and activate "Load Fail-Safe Defaults".also,run memtest.http://majorgeeks.com/Memtest86_d1247.html
Post back.

 

how do i get into the bios, cause what i am doing, i dont think its right, i really bad with computers

 

Press <F2> during POST to enter the system setup program.


Press <Alt> and <F> to reset the computer defaults.


Press <Esc>, select Save changes and reboot, and press <Enter> to save configuration changes.