I was working on my machine when it started to act
sluggish and some programs stopped responding then the
machine froze up. I turned off the computer for a few
minutes and got "A Disk Read Error Occurred Press
Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" I did that and get the same
result. Could this be the work of a virus? I had a virus
protection program running. Any help would be much
apprecicated. Thanks

It probably means what it says, that when trying to Read from the HDD, a
failure occurred. You can try running ChkDsk and see if it can identify/fix
the problem.

Pat

"ryan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:603d01c3e5c7$1eef55c0$(E-Mail Removed)...
>I was working on my machine when it started to act
> sluggish and some programs stopped responding then the
> machine froze up. I turned off the computer for a few
> minutes and got "A Disk Read Error Occurred Press
> Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" I did that and get the same
> result. Could this be the work of a virus? I had a virus
> protection program running. Any help would be much
> apprecicated. Thanks

> "ryan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:603d01c3e5c7$1eef55c0$(E-Mail Removed)...
> >I was working on my machine when it started to act
> > sluggish and some programs stopped responding then the
> > machine froze up. I turned off the computer for a few
> > minutes and got "A Disk Read Error Occurred Press
> > Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" I did that and get the same
> > result. Could this be the work of a virus? I had a virus
> > protection program running. Any help would be much
> > apprecicated. Thanks


What size hard drive do you have? Anything over 137GB not on a ATA
133 card will probably cause this problem because the overlay on the
drive is "on". This means that the hard drive is fooling your BIOS to
think that the drive is smaller so that your OS will recognize the
full size of the disk. This was the solution that worked for
me....after calling Maxtor. If you end up having to do this...you
will have to format the drive and reinstall windows. If you install
it on an ATA 133 card be sure to hit F6 during the first 10 seconds of
XP installation (this will install the drivers for the ATA 133 card).
You will need to have the drivers on a 3.5" disk. And most likely if
you have another drive somewhere that has an OS on it...you can slave
the drive that is giving you boot problems and copy all important
information over so that you don't lose it during the format.