Windows Vista forum: Upon boot up, I receive a message Disk Error, Press any key.

I cannot even get into windows in the first place. I need a way to boot to DOS or something I would imagine.

I think I have a similar problem with my Dell XPS M1530 laptop. Bought refurbished from Dell 8 months ago; came with Vista Ultimate 32 Bit and thankfully no junk software loaded on it. Last week I installed office 2007 student and at the same time received message that there were windows upgrades available so I allowed them to be installed (several that were recommended and some others that were optional). A couple of days later it would not boot. Goes right into Windows Error Message and loops through the startup repair with no change. I tried the launch windows normally and it either doesnt get by the microsoft scroll bar or goes to blue screen - Stop C0000221 unknown hard error\systemboot\system32\ntdll.dll
I did have a Vista Reinstallation DVD that came with the laptop and tried to boot from that. Using this disk I launched the Startup Repair. The Diagnosis & Repair detail box showed-- Root Cause Found: System volume on disk is corrupt (chkdsk) Result completed successfully. Error code 0X0 time taken 160447ms. After this I received the same blue screen error.
I cannot get vista to boot. I also do not have backup of any data. I just got 500GB ego ext HD recommended by Dell tech support but not sure what to do next. I did read the post cited by Bob above and just downloaded ubuntu but not sure if this is appropriate for my situation.
Thank you for suggestions.

Thanks Bob. Not sure what you mean by the AMD issue; Did you mean AMD athlon chip? if so, probably Not applicable. Laptop Specs: Dell XPS M1530 Intel core 2 Duo T9300 2.5 GHz/800Mhz FSB, 6MB cache, 160 Gig 7200 rpm HD w/free fall, blu-ray RW double speed drive, 4GB DDR2 SDRAM 667Mhz RAM (2 DIMMs), Vista Ultimate 32 bit OS, DW 1395 802.11G wireless card, 15.4 WUXGA screen truelife, bluetooth, sound blaster Audigy Advanced HD Audio, 256 mb Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT.

So, would like to repair Vista but if not possible, would need to try to recover data on my HD, primarily digital photos. Im willing to try myself before calling Dell back and spend hours on the phone. When I talked to Dell before the tech repeatedly said it was likely I would need to reformat HD. Still have hardware warranty and Dell phone support for 1st year. If I understood him right, he said once I had the external HD we could check for a Windows Old file and maybe save some of the HD data.

Also, I did get one other blue screen error message after a Vista repair attempt. Error was: Stop 0X0000007B (0X80399B0, 0XC0000034, 0X00000000, 0X00000000)

Thanks for further assistance, Rob.

Ive been out of town and am back- Thanks thus far. I made the Ubuntu OS boot disk as suggested in that post cited above and was successful with booting the laptop with ubuntu and can see all the folders on my laptop HD. I would like some guidance on which folders to save. The laptop HD has a main folder labelled OS that has about 15 subfolders (Boot, Dell, doctemp, documents and settings, drivers, program files, etc) as well as 5 individual files (config.sys, autoexec.bat, etc). Im not sure if I should copy the whole OS folder or just individual folders & files. My external HD is 500gb and my laptop HD is 160gb so I have adequate space on the external HD to copy everything. Also, could you suggest the best method of copying? Thanks.

Thanks Bob. Almost finished copying files onto ext HD. Also, to answer one of you earlier concerns, other than internal bluetooth and wireless cards that have were always installed and running fine, I didnt have any other hardware attached to the laptop. Is Next step to reinstall Vista with the repair disk? I understand this would probably reformat the laptop HD. I have a Dell Reinstallation DVD for Vista Ultimate 32 Bit. You mentioned some ways to repair Vista. Open to suggestions. Thanks.

First, thank you both for the posts; very helpful. I wanted to provide a follow up to help others. I continued with the Dell tech service via phone over several sessions and finally deleted the partitions/info on the internal HD and then reinstalled Dell MediaDirect and then Vista - in that order per specs on my Dell XPS m1530. The first tech did not have me install the MediaDirect app and the next guy said that was a mistake due to the hardware config on my laptop. However, even after the reinstallation of MediaDirect software and Vista in the right order, Vista still would not boot - no blue screen but kept getting the same windows error message when it attempts to boot. I ran the diagnostics from the Dell Drivers and Utilities CD on the HD and after about 18hours the tests came back as Pass. Also ran another memory test from the diagnostics menu and that passed as well. Dell techs were unable to suggest any other repair attempts and offered to send out a new hard drive and new RAM so new hardware is on the way.