Dell Running XP Fails to Boot

My friend owns a Dell tower (I think a Dimension) that won't boot up. After flashing the Dell logo it goes to a Black Screen of Death.

I believe the problem manifested in the form of his computer slowing to a crawl and then throwing up a Blue Screen of Death when he tried to restart it.

I've tried the last known good configuration. It also freezes the same way.

I've tried starting in safe mode. It freezes. The last thing displayed is windows\system32\drivers\ndis.sys

I've tried replacing ndis.sys using the recovery console. That didn't help. I also tried fixboot, chkdsk, and bootcfg, but not fixmbr because the warning messages about potentially making a partition inaccessible scared my friend off, but to my understanding that should be irrelevant because I reinstalled Windows XP over his current installation (repair, not reformat). The repair completed successfully but the Black Screen of Death remains.

I had my friend swap out the RAM. Didn't help. His computer told him that it detected a change in the amount of RAM present and asked him if he wanted to go into setup. I didn't have him change anything in setup. Did he need to?

The hard drive (IDE) and the RAM are both fairly new. He installed them both within the last half a year and has been using them without any problems.

My friend is running the latest BIOS for his machine from Dell.

I'm thinking that the motherboard might need to be replaced but I really don't know. Can anyone confirm this as a good guess? Does this sound like a hardware issue? Any other ideas?

Thanks a lot, everyone.

 

I had the Vundo virus which ultimatly did the same thing to my pc. It's been a while but I recall I tried to put in my original cd and just put XP in all over again, clean, but could not because my boot kernel was corrupted. I searched the net on fixing kernel errors with DOS command and after a couple of easy steps it booted through to XP like normal. I will look around and see if I can find the site I visited, but it has been a while now.

 

OK, I put a new boot.ini file on a cd/or a floppy disk from another computer and then had the screwed up pc boot from cd.

I found a website something like this, and did use the same codes and procedure as this fix. http://www.ozzu.com/ftopic24580-75.html

good luck, I think you will get through it w/ a little patience.