Black Screen after POST, boots after 15 min

Hi,

Need some help on the following problem!

A friend got a second hand dell (1.5 Ghz, 512 MB RAM, 60GB HD etc) with Win XP SP2 ready installed. The first thing I did was partition the drive into 3 drives (1 primary, 1 extended with 2 logical, all FAT32). All went well and I installed a couple of bits of software.

The next day I am informed that the system hangs for 5 minutes after POST, but then boots as normal. After some research it looks like a problem with the Master Boot Record, Partition table, Boot sector, or NT Loader. I've eliminated a problem with the partition table as it still boots, so I created a slipstreamed sp2 disk to install the recovery console and run a fixboot and fixmbr to no effect. I then tried a repair, but couldn't boot from the CD so used some xp start-up disks (assume not Service Packed) but received an error saying some file .SP2 was corrupt (sorry, can't remember the filename).

Since then the PC hangs for 15 minutes and dropped the printer driver and video driver. The printer was already fixed when I saw it but the video drivers appear to be there when I looked in device manager, but the screen is still in VGA mode and won’t let me change it.

One other piece of information: even trying to go into the bios or booting from floppy causes it to hang.

Any help greatly appreciated.