continuous reboot loop, possible hardware failure

I need some help:

I was t-shooting a client's comp last night, a P4 2.6, 512 ram, XP Home box. Every power on or reboot brings up the boot menu & it will not even boot in Safe Mode. When booting it flashes a bsod very rapidly and then reboots & I can't read the bsod, because the comp is likely set to reboot upon errors like this.
How can I set this system to NOT reboot when bsod encountered? I know how to do this from windows but can it be done from the recovery console?

Here's what led to the trouble:
1. cpu fan was failing.
2. owner's employee changed the heatsink & fan to an oil cooled unit that was not properly mounted and a bit loose.
3. 2 weeks later the reboot loop began.

I put back the original heatsink with new grease & a new cpu fan. Problem persists.

Also, I have an ide > usb converter device that I use to connect ide devices to any comp and the drive will show up as a removable drive in windows. I used this on several different comps to try to get the existing data off the drive. Windows sees the drive, mounts it but sees it as a raw disk with no data on it. Disk management sees it as an NTFS partition & Active but the disk properties say it's a raw disk.

My thoughts are:
1. partition table got corrupted somehow.
2. drive is failing.
3. some other MB malfunction or both above.

I'm going to test the comp with a different drive but I also need to get that bsod message. How can I do that?

 

Strange issue persists.
I ended up changing out the cdrom drive that could read cdr disks (it had an old cdrom installed in a pinch). Booted from an older Knoppix Linux CD & it could read the drive, so I slaved an old hd and copied the important data to the slaved drive. Client bought a new comp anyway so all I need to do now is setup his new system & restore his important data. And my fee for this job? ...a NOW functional P4 2.6 working system!