Disk Read Error

Hello,

I'm trying to help my friend figure out what's wrong with his computer. I've read through the few other topics with a similar problem but couldn't find the answer I was looking for.

My friend is also pretty computer illiterate (he didn't know the difference between Pentium and AMD) so he couldn't provide me with as much information as I'd have liked. The only things he could tell me were that:
1) his computer was running on Windows XP
2) it was a very old Dell computer that no longer had warranty, and
3) he downloaded a "race track" for his Nascar game from some guy he knows and unzipped it and played the game without any problem.

The next time he tried to boot up his computer though, it would not boot up. I wasn't sure I understood the problem from what he was telling me over the phone so I went to take a look in person. Apparently, this was the error message that he had been getting:

"A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart"

And of course, pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del eventually brought him back to the same screen. I tried it and the same thing happened. The first thing I noticed after pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del and before I saw the Dell logo was "NO INPUT SIGNAL" in a "text box" with red border flashing.

I went into BIOS to take a look and everything looked pretty "normal" from what I could see.

I tried going into safe mode but nothing I did would take me to safe mode. I've tried everything key and combination of keys that I could think of and find online, but nothing worked.

I also tried to use his Windows XP CD that came with his computer to attempt a fix, but was unsuccessful. I went into BIOS to select CD-ROM as the primary boot device, but it wouldn't boot from the CD.

So I don't know what else to do. Based on what I've read on a few other websites, this could possibly be a hard disk (bad sector) error. Is that right?

One thing I haven't tried is to run his hard drive on my computer. I'm opposed to hooking his hard drive up to my computer as a slave drive - I've had a few major virus/malware attacks before (thank you MajorGeeks for saving my computer!) so I'm quite paranoid about things like this.

Any comments or suggestions would really be appreciated. Thank you in advance!

 

Your probably right on the hard disk going. is there any place you could take the hard disk to check it? Some places offer free diagnostics services that could check it.. Another thought was protection services? Like anti-viruses or spyware removal programs....