Interesting laptop problem

Hi all, wondering if I can pick your brains. I've been asked to look at a laptop that will not boot up. It will go so far and then flash of a blue screen (too fast to look at) and restart. I would try doing a system repair but the CD drive isn't working (nice to tell me that after I spent time trying to work that one out). Tried booting from an external dvd drive but no joy and no joy trying to boot from a USB flash drive even the bios allegedly supports it.
Laptop is a HP Compaq NX6110 that was running XP Pro when it worked.

I'm guessing that a user profile has gotten corrupted as if I try and boot in safe mode it gets as far as MUPS.sys before restarting.

Any help you can give me would be great and I would love it if someone pointed out the obvious mistake I've made.

Cheers

Mal

If you can press the F8 key to get the safe mode boot menu and see if you can disable the restarting on error option. That way when you get the BSOD it will stop there and you can at least read the page and that information will give us some clues.

Thanks for that tip, I've tried it and now got the message. It is an unmountable boot volume with a stop error of 0x000000ED. My normal solution would be to just run a repair using windows xp boot disk but the goosed cd drive isn't going to help.

Unmountable boot volume usually means a failing hard drive. When you tried booting from a USB CD/DVD-Rom or a Flash drive did you modify the boot options in the BIOS and make sure the BIOS was set to allow boot from USB. Some BIOS's have extra options like that that are not always enabled. Seeing as the ROM drive is not reading as well it could also be a faulty IDE/SATA controller on the motherboard. I would say run some diagnostics on the Hard Drive but first you have to find a method that you can successfully boot off of.