My laptop was working fine... then it would load the windows start up repair.. it did that for 3 days now its coming up a black scren with 'a disk read error occurred press ctrl+alt+del to restart?

All hard disk eventually fail, there is hope several vendors offer utilites to repair failing hard drives. The best I have used is Spinright from GRC. Unless the heads are in contact with the platters, or there is another mechanical or controller board this software has repaired nearly every disk I have used it with. I have had to let the software run for several days in one case.