Windows XP Home edition PC fails to boot fully

[Ironfist]

My friend had a computer which stopped working the other day and asked me to repair it. I was told it was 18 months old.

The problem appeared to be that it would not boot. I attempted booting normally- it starts accessing the drive to boot, and gets to a certain point at which it stops and restarts. When loading in safe mode, I get a list of files being accessed to load, which streams to a point, when it stops and just accesses the hard drive constasntly for 30 seconds -> 1 minute before restarting again. When I boot in Safe Mode with Command Prompt, the same happens.

I tried booting off of a Boot Disk, but get as far as it asking me to enter command prompts. When I type in c: to get it to load that drive, it says, 'Invalid drive path' (or something along those lines). This also happens when entering d: or e:, despite it having 2 cd/dvd drives.

The computer is an Advent model, with an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ processor runing Windows XP Home Edition. Unfortunately, i only have an XP Professional boot CD. Also, I checked the temperature of the CPU in the PC, and saw it was 61 degrees C. I have since cleaned the dust from the PC including from the heat sink, but it seems not to be cooling down so well. However, I am not sure that is the problem.

If you can help me, please do. I will try to supply any extra information you may need about the computer.

EDIT: I think the problem may be that the hard drive is full/needs defragging or checkdisking or virus scanning, but I can't do any oif that without loading XP, and I can't checkdisk it because it can't see the drive when I try to. I really need to try and save the hard drive data if possible.

[blinky54]

Does your friend have his Recovery Disk?

[Devilsbabe]

Have you check for faulty memory sticks, try putting yours in if they are the same type and see if it loads with your memory, if worse comes to worse try slaving his hard drive on your comp and defragging that way or at least be able to get to the data

[Devilsbabe]

to get a boot disk try here http://www.bootdisk.com/ you can download on to a floppy the correct one you need