I'm assuming that your windows disk isn't "bootable" .

You could try downloading and burning a bootable cd or perhaps borrow one.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1R2GGLL_en-GB&q=windows+cd+boot+disk+download&meta=

The laptop may not have enough memory to run Vista.

Have you added RAM? How much RAM do you have in the laptop?

To repair the disk get someone to download either a Knoppix CD image or the Ultimate Boot CD image. Burn it to a CD and use it to boot your Laptop.

First reformat your hard disk, scan for and correct any HD errors and (the best idea of all!) install WinXP Pro!!!

Anyone who uses/wants Vista is at best "slightly Crazy!"

I agree with Andy about formatting. Vista is ok if you have a computer thats not ancient.

If you want a light weight fast OS download Ubuntu and install that. It has all of the drivers you will ever need for your hardware included in the OS!! With all of the free programs available you may never look back to Microsoft.

Steve

If you want to change the source of the boot (floppy to cd) you will need to go into the computer setup program. After restarting the computer you will have to hit one of the keys (mine is F2 with Dell XP) there is a choice offered "boot" You can change it there without too much of a problem.

First when "A Disk Read Error Occurred" is it trying to read CD or hard drive? If its the CD then see if you got scratches on it. If so clean it or get something to polish the scratches out.

If the error is from reading hard drive, try take the drive out put it in a USB enclosure and format it. Check and see how many bad sectors it got after format. You may need to buy a new hard drive.

A way into windows but only a temp fix...

Boot using the WinXP CD and use the recovery console (hitting R when it asks). IF and only IF you get the dos based screen AND you get something like:

1. C:\WINDOWS

Please choose which windows you want to use: 1.... Or something like that.

If you do, then type 1 and hit enter, it will ask for your administrator password which I hope you know. Then at the command prompt enter: chkdsk /r
The /r switch tells chkdsk to scan the entire drive and recover any bad sectors. Depending on the size of your drive this could take a REALLY long time. Once that is all said and done. Reboot the computer and you should not get the error.

For a real fix, you're going to have to revert back to Fat32. There are 2 ways to go about this. Assuming that you can get back into windows doing the above, you can either use a program like Partition Magic and hopefully convert your system from NTFS back to Fat32. Or you can backup everything on your hard-drive, boot using the Windows XP disk and reinstall the OS and make sure to choose to repartition the hard-drive using Fat32.

You can repair bad sectors without reformatting using the /r switch when using chkdsk. The information that is in the sector may or may not be recoverable however.