Windows XP Home not booting

[mblethen]

My COMPAQ has windows xp home and now it will not boot. I have went through putting the xp software back in the CD Drive and did a reinstall of the setup routine. The next step was for the computer to restart so the setup would begin. The computer restarts and gets to a blue screen that says "setup is being restarted........" then computer keeps rebooting over and over and never gets by that point. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[raybay]

Most likely a failed or failing hard drive.
Is the drive older than two years. Is it a Maxtor, Hitachi, Samsung, or Western Digital. What is the size of the hard drive.
You are at risk of losing any data on the hard drive.

 

[mblethen]

Drive is a western digital and the notebook is definitely more than 2 years. Hard drive is 20GB. Problem started with msn hijacking homepage and changing register values.