Asus boot problems.....please help !

[Dustydharma]

I am trying to help fix my friend's notebook. When I turn it on it stops just at the first blue Windows XP
screen just before the password screen and then it goes haywire and loops back to dos somewhere and
then tries again like it's caught in an endless loop. I tried to get to the bios but only found a small bios-like
little blue window against black that was some kind of tool for setting the boot sequence. I don't know
the right key to get to the bios so haven't reached that. I did get it to boot up in Safe mode but not sure
how to proceed from there. He just bought this notebook used for pretty cheap and I guess he got what
he paid for but it worked when he first saw and tested it. He said all he did was use the feature to play
DVD movies without turning on the notebook. I was thinking maybe that system doesn't turn off it's hold
on Windows booting or else maybe there is some key combo to make it allow Windows again. Also, I have
read elsewhere it could be a boot virus but would Window's load in Safe mode if it had one ? Any ideas
would be appreciated ! The notebook is Asus M2400N Pentium 1.6 , 700mg ram.

 

[tomvertommen]

Maybe you can try formatting the harddisk and reinstalling windows ?

 

[Dustydharma]

Maybe you can try formatting the harddisk and reinstalling windows ?

I did think of that but was hoping for an easier fix. My friend does
have a couple of CDs that are home made that came with the machine
but not sure yet what they are.

 

[Dustydharma]

Did he get the disk with the operating system on it?

Put the disk in the drive and set boot sequence to boot from cd/dvd and do a recovery or windows repair.

He got some unmarked disks and I'm not sure yet if the OS is there. I tried to help him at the library and then
with strange timing ( the library's internet server crashed ! ) and I live a long way from him . I'll try to reinstall I
guess , next time I see him. Thanks for the suggestion .

 

[Dustydharma]

Thanks everyone for help ! It turned out to be a harddrive failure problem and
gave some serious sounding system warnings of impending doom ( without
actually mentioning the harddrive as the issue ) . I did reformat the drive and do
the whole reinstall and update process and it seemed fixed and worked fine. Then
when I brought the machine proudly to my friend thinking it was all well, we turned
it on to test and it did the same old failed to boot up cycle all over again. I had put
in over 20 hours to get this running again and of course was very disappointed !
My friend took it back to the person he bought from and had the hard drive replaced. Wish I knew diagnostics better ! Anyway, thank again to all of you for trying.

 

[Dustydharma]

Best answer selected by Dustydharma.