Virus? Hardware Failure? Me being a n00b? Help please!

Ok so here is the deal. I was using Google Earth a couple days ago. My system began to slow WAY down. It sat there for a couple minutes and didn’t do anything. So I Pushed in my power button, held it down so that it would shut down the computer so I could restart it (like I have done many time before with no problems). When I started it back up, there was no problem initially. I got to the cpu startup screen. I pressed F1 like I always do to continue starting up without using my floppy drive (I have done this for a couple of years with no issue).

However once I got past the initial start up screen, this screen popped up.



Now, normally this would not be a problem. However the arrow keys seemed to be disabled because I can not move the cursor to the “safe mode”. I have tried pressing F8 repeatedly to get to safe mode in the normal way, but this has been unsuccessful also.

Once the cursor automatically selects to start windows normally it goes to the normal windows start up screen with the 3 scrolling blue boxes in the bar, and then my computer restarts.

This process repeats over and over.

I am stumped on this one guys. Any help you can provide would be a big help.

Thanks for your help.

Neil

Here are my System Specs:

Amd xp 2200+
Soyo Dragon K7VXB motherboard
1 GB ram
120 GB hard drive (master, XP installed on this drive) and 200 GB Seagate HD (slave)
Radeon 9550 256mb video card
(Yeah I know it’s an old system, I will be building a new one this summer)

Also as a foot note: try a ps2 keyboard to get those bios and pre-windows keys and arrows to actually work - a lot of USB keyboard will not work UNTILL windows fully boots up to the desktop