Weird boot issue

[Django x2]

Trying to fix a friends PC. They had the royal mail attachment virus and when their computer shut down, it restarts saying

A disk read error occured Press CTRL+Alt_Del to restart

Not a problem, I thought. I'll just whack the Xp disc in and do a repair.

Problem is, no matter what I set the boot option to in the BIIOS, this error message appears directly after POST. It's like it's ignoring what I'm telling it.

Any ideas?

 

[twist3d0n3]

can you get it started in dos? you could try that fixmbr thing, seems like it can't find the boot record

 

[Django x2]

Ahhaha, I've found the issue. I was trying to boot from the CD-ROM with a burned XP Home DVD. Thing is, this computer is so old, it's not a DVD drive, just CD-ROM so I had to find an original XP Disc, which I did, and it booted straight up. C: partition is fried though, reinstall me thinks