xp boot problem

[WizDawg]

A friend of mine called me today looking for help. He has a newer, about 1.5 year old, presario 2500 laptop. Out of the blue the otherday, when turning it on, it gets to the WinXP loading screen, then reboots itself. It then continues this loop over and over. He had a somewhat PC literate friend try to reinstall WinXP, but I was told they were only able to get to the 75% mark and it would freeze. I was planning on getting out of town this weekend and visiting, so I told him I would check it out while I was there. Anyone have any ideas on where we should start on thing?

Thanks in advance!
Brian

P.S. I forgot to say I was told by him that his friend wasn't able to boot in safe mode

[ktkendall]

Press F8 before windows starts to try to load and get to the alternate boot choices menu and try safe mode and/or last known good confuguration and let us know if either of those work and we'll go from there. Could be software drivers problem or could be an actual hardware problem. This is the first step to narrow it down to which one.

[WizDawg]

I was told that 'safe mode' and 'last know config' were no good. As far as what exactly happens, I am not sure. My guess is it just reboots in the never-ending rebooting loop. This is a friend I know from college. He still lives there and I am now 2+ hours away, so I really can't get my hands on it until I visit. And, he isn't a computer guy at all, so it's hard getting info from him over the phone.

You say the 1st step is to narrow it down between software and hardware. How would you go about that? What did you have in mind?

[ktkendall]

If your sure those options, (safe mode, or last known good config) do not work then I would do a repair installation of XP next, and if that fails then it's pretty sure a hardware issue, in which case you strip the system down and begin hardware troubleshooting procedure to isolate the bad component. That can be tough though if you have no spare components to test with and since you can not get into windows especially if the repair installation fails you may have a hard time isolating because you can get it down to perhaps motherboard, processor, memory, or vid card is bad but to isolate exactly which one you need to be able to test each one individually in a known good machine or replace each piece one at a time with known good ones till you get the bad one.

[glc]

If a reinstall freezes at 75% (with all peripherals disconnected and all PC Cards ejected), it's a hardware issue, and being a laptop, I'd suspect a failing hard drive or flaky ram first - there's not much more you can play with in a laptop.