Dell 4550 Dimension Boot Problem

[nodnerb2]

Hi,

This problem I am about to describe here is not on my machine it was relayed to me over the phone from another country. After I post the details I am going to send the person who owns the troublesome machine an e mail with a link to this site so he can see the suggestions for himself and we can talk through them by phone.

The Machine in question is about 12 months old. It was bought with Win XP installed as std on it. The Owner didn't like XP so I formatted it and installed Win 98 SE on it. It ran fine and after a about 5- 6 months he bought another HDD and we reloaded the original setup so it was now back to being an XP Machine.

It has run flawlessley until he went to turn it on last night after having been away at work all week.

He powers it up and it starts up to the Dell Splash screen after a few secnds the thing just stops responding and the screen is completely blank with a faint illumination.

He has tried every option from the start up menu and each ends in the same result a faintly illuminated dark screen.

He reconnected the drive that had Win 98 on it and the PC Boots up no probs.

I got him to reconnect the XP Drive and start it up with a Win 98 Bootdisk in the Floppy Drive. When he tried to run F DISK it reported it as a non FAT Partition which is correct as far as I recollect XP would be running on an NTFS partition. Is this right?

After this I got him to type at the A:\cd C: to see if he could get to view the directory on the C Drive.He said C:\ flashed briefly and then it returned to the A:\ My DOS is duff in fact all my comp skills have deteriorated as I haven't been playing about with Comps for ages.Is this the correct command and can this command be run on an NTFS Partition?

Any help or sugestions gratefully received

Cheers

Nodnerb2