Dell Latitude D600 "A DISK READ ERROR OCURRED. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

On a Dell Latitude D600 I booted up the system and found out this morning that a "DISK READ ERROR OCURRED ... Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" ... error came up. I read a bunch of blogs about his usse and after a couple of attempts , I found the answer.

"A disk read error occurred" can be cause by different things, like MBR has corrupted, or the MOBO (motherboard) doesn't recognize it and/ or HDD just failed.

Let's try some command to see if it works:

1) First boot to windows XP CD and go to the repair option.  In the repair menu select the windows were is installed. Then type "fixboot" and "fixmbr".

If unit still doesn't work, jumped to the next conclusion.

2) So I had installed a replacement 250GB Western Digital drive, while the BIOS has a 137GB limitation. The drive worked fine for a while, but then stopped. I would have liked to update the BIOS to a newer one without the limitation, but the floppy drive wasn't cooperating. Instead, I booted from a Linux live CD and used gparted to resize the boot partition on the hard drive to 130GB, below the 137GB limit. If gparted doesn't work, try Acronis 2009 Disk Director (you will need to buy it). At that point the computer booted normally from the hard disk again. It's a pretty simple and logical explanation for what was causing the problem, but it took a long time to find the right answer
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Here's a link for Acronis Disk Director, if you want to buy it.  Acronis Disk Director V11 Home

Hope it helps. :)