When my thinkpad boots up I get the following error "a disk read error occurred" "press ctrl alt del to restart" when I hit ctrl alt del it goes back to the same error

Check CD-ROM; whether it has scratched CD than difficult to read by CD drive.

maybe a usb device plugged? if not try in bios\boot sequence to set cdrom - hd - usbdev. then try to boot with the puppy sturdust linux cd. if it work is just the internal hd; format it and reinstall. hope it help bye

Have you checked your bios to see what the system is configured to boot from first? Make sure your hard drive is the first boot device in the list.

Most likely the hard drive is failing, run diagnostics on the hard drive if you have a resource CD. Or you can download them from support.dell.com

you need to click ctrl+alt+del hit cancel and it will work :)

Sounds like the hard drive has errors.
Boot to a windows XP cd.
Repair using the windows console.
at the repair console type:

chkdsk /R (hit enter)

Let that run, it takes a long time.
If it's able to repair the drive enough for operation it will.

If it cannot you will be forced to replace the hard drive.

HTH
Aaron

it probibly means your harddrive has bit the dust
it is the most common part to fail on a computer

it could be the hard drive is bad

go to bios and load defaults. if still same thing happens after reboot. Boot from OS cd, on windows etup page, choose "R" to run recovery console. Choose OS. Run CHKDSK /R.

There are a couple of possibilities.

1. The hard drive is defective.

2. The operating system is corrupt.

The easiest way to test this is to run the restore cd that came with the computer to reload Windows.

If you get this error while running the restore cd then you will need to get a new hard drive.