XP box "disk read error"

A colleague has brought into work his home computer, which was experiencing some slowness and was bogged down with some very annoying pop-ups. I told him I'd take a look at it. I ran Hijack This last week . . . (have the log, if it's of interest). Now, the thing will not even reboot. When I attempt to do so, I get the following message:

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

Any thoughts? This is a guy's home computer, with pics and docs he needs.

Thanks in advance.

 

I would try to boot into safe mode with command prompt by tapping F8 when booting the computer, then type chkdsk /r /f in the command line box that comes up.

This could take a while and might correct the errors, but if it won't boot up into safe mode with command prompt, then I would use the repair feature on your windows xp disk and typing in the same chkdks /r /f and see if that fixes whatever became corrupt.

 

Thanks. I got it to boot up. But now it's crawling along at an insufferably slow pace. Would it be appropriate to post a Hijack This log at this point? There is clearly something wrong with this machine at present. It took roughly 30-45 minutes for it successfully start up.

 

I would run CCleaner on the registry fixing part of it first to see if it can re-sort everything to work better. After that I would perform a virus and spyware scan with the programs of your choice. You might be able to perform these actions easier in safe mode (by tapping f8 while the computer is first booting up.) If nothing works, then I would back up all of your valuable data and reload Windows. I hope this information was useful and all goes well.