HP Pavilion 533W Not Booting

As always, I get to fix my in-laws computer bought at Wal-Mart. I told them
to take it back the second I saw it. My computer's specs are a little lower
than theirs, and runs much faster.

Okay, after a short power failure of a few seconds or more, the computer
will not boot into Windows XP Home Edition.
I get the POST screen, I can get into BIOS, otherwise it will show a message
that the computer was not shut down, and give me the option to go into Safe
Mode, Last Known Good Configuration, etc. Choosing any of these, shuts the
computer off right away. The power LED on the front of the tower goes from
green to orange. I then have to hold down the power button to shut it off
and try again. If I try and press F10 to go into HP's Recovery Console, it
starts to load up, but then shuts down. Using my machine, I created a MS-DOS
boot disk. It will load with it, but as soon as I do a DIR command on C:,
the computer shuts down. Any ideas? I think the harddrive has somehow
partially died, but am I missing the obvious, and ignoring another problem
that's causing it? When I opened up the tower, everything looked fine. I
reseated some components too. The harddrive has its IDE cable and a power
cable. What I found different was a single black wire goes along the IDE
cable to the drive. That is something I've never come across yet.
Thank you in advance!
Mark

Mark & Denise:

Okay, after a short power failure of a few seconds or more, the
computer will not boot into Windows XP Home Edition.
I get the POST screen, I can get into BIOS, otherwise it will show a
message that the computer was not shut down, and give me the option
to go into Safe Mode, Last Known Good Configuration, etc. Choosing
any of these, shuts the computer off right away.

Try to boot from a Knoppix CD. If it boots OK then you do not have a
hardware problem, you have a registry problem.

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

If you have a corrupted registry: First try booting with the restore
disk that came with the machine and see if you can repair the damage,
chances are probably slim.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;307545

Beyond that you will need step by step technical help that you are
unlikely to get on the net, you are going to need to contact either
Microsoft or HP's technical support, try MS first. Usually you get a
certain period of free technical support with Windows XP that starts
with your first phone call, and MS technical support is superb.
Unfortunately they will probably send you to HP's tech support.

It may end up that you need to reformat and reinstall from the restore
disk. Use the Knoppix disc to move any valuable data off the hard drives
before reformatting.
--
Mac Cool