I have a Dell D600 laptop which is now about 6 years old. In 2008, I upgraded the hard drive from the original 80 GB Fujitsu drive to a Western Digital 160 GB drive (NTFS formatted). Until last week all had been well with the system (the full hard drive was recognized by Windows XP Pro SP3 even though it was identified as a 137 GB drive by the BIOS, and it booted just fine). Then, upon rebooting I received an error message "A disk read error occurred. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart." I retried to boot several times and received the same message. On the chance that the MBR or boot files had become corrupted, I tried to run the restore utilities from the Windows installation disk, but the Windows installation would not load completely. To remove the CD/DVD drive as the source of the problem, I loaded a live CD installation of Kubuntu which did just fine. It even found the files on the hard drive. Likewise, gpartd was able to see the drive and the files on it. I could install the drive in an Apricorn EZ-Upgrade device and read the files on the drive via a USB connection to a desktop computer. [I copied over my working files just in case.] I also used Western Digital's tools to diagnose the disk, but no problems were found. I did a memory test of the laptop, and no problems were found. Finally, I reinstalled the old hard drive and used the Windows XP installation disk as though I was going to install the OS on the Fujitsu drive (it had been wiped clean). The installation routine started just fine with this hard drive. I also tried to use a Windows 7 trial disk to see if the drive could be recognized, but it did not see it. So, I have a hard drive which can be detect by a working Windows installation, which can be seen by a live CD installation of Kubuntu, but which will not boot and which will not serve as an installation drive for Windows. Does anyone have any ideas?