need help, please (winXP)

[Toothpick]

Hey All
My question is for my friends new system. He brought it in to work Friday and I put it together for him. Its an Apollo mobo with DDR-ram and a very vanilla set up as he is not a gamer at all, actually he's a newbie with computers. He took it home with him on Friday and he's

not sure what he did to, but heres the symptoms (btw he using winXP) while he was doing something it totally locked up on him and now he can't get back into Windows at all even in 'safe-mode'.

I'm sorry for the brief explanation but I just told you everything he told me over the phone. So I guess what I am asking is how does one go into WinXP when safe mode will not allow it ?

P.S. I do know that when I installed his video card for him and then loaded up the drivers the machine after rebooting would not go back into windows as it did the go-into-windows-then-reboot thing, but I did use safe mode to uninstall the drivers that I had loaded up.

the video card that came with his system is the "ATI Radeon 7200"

here is his sytem specs (as much as I can remember)

Apollo mobo/256meg-DDR-ram
AMD 1700+ cpu
ATI Radeon 7200
on board sound
diamond 56k modem
optical mouse

 

[yazz]

try to get an error code. it makes solving these problems a lot easier.

 

[yazz]

read these threads and see if they sound familar. your problem kinda sounds like what these guys are going through:


http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=724557


http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=724348

 

[Grommet5]

hmm, try booting off the winxp cd and going to the recovery console. then type in chkdsk /r. See if that works