Hi! I left my computer on last night. It was working fine when I went to bed. This morning, I had a black screen with the message 'disk read error occurred' then 'Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart'. When I do so, it just tries to reboot again and I get the same message.
I created a boot disk with ntdetect.com, ntldr and a boot.ini. (though I'm not sure I got the syntax of the boot.ini correct, there was a lot of technical stuff I didn't understand in the kb article 102873 I didn't really understand and I made sure the boot sequence was CD-ROM first (I don't have a disk drive). Then I get the exact same message with 'Boot from CD' in front of it. I also tried creating a disk with the file winxpsp1_en_pro_bf.exe on it from kb 310994. I got the same message as when trying to boot with the other CD.
Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do next? What could have caused this, on its own in the middle of the night? Do I have a virus...did my hard drive crash...did I lose everything???

Hi welcome to the forum Just t make this clear are you booting of some kind of boot CD or off the windows o/s cd?