Combo problem (+10 pts!) NTLDR + windows failure, possible hardware failure?

[IronManIngellis]

Hello all, I would first like to say hi and thank you for your time in reading my post (first time here ^^) 

Anyway, a friend of mine called me with a computer problem and instead of going through the whole story, this is the background I got from him.

-His computer first stopped booting windows: it would open to the desktop but then fail to load anything else: icons, start menu, taskbar, etc.  He would be forced to restart the computer.

-When he went to reinstall windows, he put the windows XP CD in the drive, set book priority to CD-ROM, disabled all other boot devices.  Turned on the computer with the CD in the drive and recieved the legendary NTLDR error, ctr+alt+delete and all that silliness.

-He unplugged the 2nd CD drive, thinking the computer was trying to boot from a drive that didn't have the CD drive in it.  After that, the computer wouldn't boot further than the logo screen and "press del to enter bios settings"

So he plugged it back in, got the same error, and then tried putting the XP CD in the other CD drive and got it to boot up to the point where it loaded some microsoft setup files but crashed after saying "error loading <some long string of letters and numbers that he read over the phone>.exe setup cannot continue".

This seems to me a hardware problem more than anything, if it was a bad windows CD it would get further than the bios, right?

The computer is ~4 years old:
Pentium 4 3.0
1 gb RAM
[Windows XP]
ATA/IDE Hard drive and DVD Drive + DVD RW

Thanks a lot for all your help, and thank you for being patient with the long post!

[Broni]

Did you go through this: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm?

[IronManIngellis]

Yes, like I said it wasn't a hard drive boot problem, the NTLDR is coming from booting from the CD drive but only on special occasions. 

We all know that a windows installation CD is bootable, so it's not that we're trying to boot from a non-bootable source.

You can't alter the data on said CD unless the cd itself is physically damaged which I suspect it is not.

The BIOS, like I said, is set to the CD drive as the primary boot device, so it doesn't seem like a boot device problem.

I would also suspect it's not a jumper problem or connection problem since he can get an error to come up AFTER booting off the windows CD.

My suspicions are that it's not the hard drive, or we wouldn't have problems prior to using it.
I would also think that it is not the PSU, because the computer seems to power all components and doesn't freeze up immediately or power down sporadically.

Possibly a hardware: motherboard or DVD drive failure?

[Broni]

See, if CD will boot in any other computer.
I'd run HD diagnostic, just in case: http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

[IronManIngellis]

Hmm, sounds like it might be a good idea, thanks for the suggestion.