hang up on start up

Something has confused my computer. I run xp home and right now it doesn't seem to matter. The computer starts with the opening black page with basic info and such, then goes to the next black page with the drives and stops at boot from disk. It won't go from there. I was once lucky enough to get it to the screen (f8) to try safe mode, but it wouldn't do that either. I'm not thrilled. There is no error messages or such, it just doesn't seem to care any more! here are the basic stats on it:
Pentium 4
2.66 ghz
1 gb ram
I can get it into setup/q-flash, but I'm not sure that will help me.
Rod/imgnf

 

okay, since posting that it started up and is running fine. It did this a few days ago and unfortunately someone turned it off on me. But regardless I would still like some ideas as to why it's doing that. Why is it stopping on set up? And why won't it read the CD? And why do I use a computer? j/k.
Rod/imgnf