Dell 2400 may have died plz help

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link590o

I'm on my brother's laptop at the moment. my desktop experienced a moment of complete failure.

i was on my computer, and i popped in a cd to update my video drivers, and then rebooted. upon reboot, the computer started getting pissy. it would show the dell boot screen, then it switched to a completely blank screen with nothing but a blinking cursor. i tried hitting a few function buttons, but it only beeped backed at me when i pushed a button.

i sat and waited hoping it would finally load windows and boot to my desktop. no such luck. it simply refuses to boot windows xp. i don't think it's a hardware problem. all of my stuff was working fine up until that restart. but i can't think of what's wrong.

if this computer dies on me, i'm screwed for like 4 months. i have to buy my own computer, so if this dies, its game over. and i don't feel like having to reformat again. its the one solution i know will work, but this happened once before and i want to figure this out once and for all. what the hell could be wrong?
 
i have a sneaking suspicion that my boot.ini file might be bad.

but i have no idea how to replace it using the recovery console. i've tried doing a bootcfg but that doesn't work. it comes back saying it failed to add the selected boot entry to the boot list. so i want to know if i can use the "expand" command to manually replace it. would that work?

how would i do it?
 
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