BSOD on XP bootup

[ThirtySixBelow]

My friends computer gets the blue screen of death after the blue bar passes by abour 2.5 times on bootup of windows and the computer just restarts. When i tried to run it in safe mode, it just restarted. I tried to do a windows recovery but it would not give me the option and when i ran the recovery console it did not give me option to select the boot sector or whatever (where you push 1 and then type the password). When going to do a fresh install i did see that it did not know what the filesystem was on the hdd. He said he was just talking on aim and got the bsod and everytime he has booted it up it just hits the bsod after two passes in xp boot screen and restarts. Does anyone have any idea what the culprit might be, or what he could do to fix it. He is running a Dell if that has something to do with the HDD not knowing what its filesystem is except for a 32 MB partition in FAT. thanks

 

[Shrapnill]

Have you tried just reformating and partitioning into NTFS? I dont understand exactly what youve tried in order to fix it...

So the computer started crashing on random and now wont load up windows or repair it? If in that space of time someone attempted a fresh install in FAT32 that may be a problem. Make sure your HDD is reading full and that its fully (properly) partitioned in NTFS.

 

[sPlAtOiD]

Does he have a firewall and a updated virus scaner.He might have picked up a virus.And it might have distroyed the boot sector.But not real sure about that one.