a disk read error occurred press ctrl + del to restart

hi there, my nephew has a hp desktop pc, running win xp sp2. has been working, installed some automatic updates and now when he starts it he gets "a disk read error occured, press ctrl and del to restart" how do we fix this ??

 

First try and roll-back this muthu.

When you start the machine, press the F8 to get into the starting mode menue.
If you got it right you should have a list of options such as:
'Start Windows Normally', or 'Safe Mode' etc.....

One of the options should read somthing like: Start from last known good configuration..
Try and boot through this option and post results...

 

First you might try grabbing an 98 or XP startup disk and running chkdsk to see what it finds.

 

nothing happens, he cant even get that far, all he gets is the disk failure message he can get in to bios thouugh

 

Is the BIOS detecting the hard drive correctly?