Question on XP Pro.

A friend of several years recently brought his machine to me.
Machine is a piecemeal machine that somebody put together, so brand is unknown.
His family had some friends over one night, and their son got to playing with the machine.
My friend thought nothing of it until the next morning when he tried to boot it up.
Somehow, it now had a System password that needed to be entered before Windows would load.
Changed the CMOS jumper and reset to Default.
Felt good when the password request didn't popup on reboot.
THEN I get the message to insert the Windows disk to continue installation.
WTF?
Has been running XP Pro as long as I have known him.
There was no disk in the drive.
Friend doesn't have the disk.
How can I possibly get this lined out, or is Linux in this machines future?

 

I'm wondering if it has a recovery partition and that one is set as Active/Boot rather than the XP partition. I seem to remember once setting the recovery partition as the boot partition and getting a strange activation message.

Do you have a Linux disk to use gparted to take a look which partition is set to Boot?

 

Have checked already.
No Recovery partition.
C is 2nd in order. CD drive is 1st.

 

I'm not sure. I've seen that error before but I can't say what the solution was. Resetting CMOS shouldn't effect XP.

What is the exact wording of the error?

Can you recovery console or a Linux disk to read the C:\boot.ini?