Freezes

I am trying to fix a friends lap top that freezes upon booting. I have tried to boot into normal mode, safe mode with no luck. I get to the XP logo screen and then nothing. It froze when I tried to boot with the XP disk as well. He wanted to format the drive anyway (his girlfriends old work computer) so I down loaded "The Ultimate boot disk" with various programs on it. I was able to scan the HD and found nothing wrong. I tried to run a few of the fdisk programs on it and they all freeze before I can re-partition and format. As the fdisk programs are loading, they all freeze at the same point when trying to load keybrd.cab.
I was able to erase the HD with one of the programs but I can not format, partition or re-install windows. The XP disk froze while trying to re-install. Any ideas?