WinXP Pro keeps boot cycling

Well, I got a interesting present today.. I went to my sister's house and her computer keeps rebooting. It's a HP w/ WinXP on it. Here's the lowdown..

Turn it on, and it goes to the boot screen. The boot screen goes away, and like it is going to go to the desktop, but a BSoD flashes REAL QUICK and then reboots, this time coming up w/ the "windows did not start" screen. Selecting Safe Mode yeilds the same result, quick BSoD, and reboot.

If I can get the restart on crash option turned off, I can read the error. But I cant even get that far.

To top things off, my sister cant remember her admin password for her computer. (Actually, I installed XP on there, and cant remember the password she wanted..)

Any help? W/o the password, I cant get into recovery console, and I went to do a repair install, and my CD doesn't give me the "R for repair" option.

 

If safe mode wont let you in and a repair install isnt possible, another soultion is to install a new copy of windows to \wintemp. Once you have that install, you will be able to load the registry of the other install and make it generate the blue screen. With any luck it will be helpful enough to give advice on whats wrong.

How to Disable a Service or Device That Prevents NT from Booting
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/165748/EN-US/

How to perform a parallel installation of Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/266465

How to perform an in-place upgrade (reinstallation) of Windows XP (read this before doing it, minor data loss is possible )
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315341

How to Perform a Windows XP Repair Install
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

 

I wish there was a way to turn off the auto reboot option w/o having to be in windows.

 

Same thing was happening on my daughter's Compaq Laptop and a friends HP. Almost positive that it had something to do with automatic updates.
I was able to fix it with booting with XP CD, then running recovery console from there. I used the chkdsk /r command. On both computers it found at least 1 corrupt file and repaired. After that both booted up fine.

 

I find that option listed on the menu when I boot to the F8 screen (pressing the F8 key immediately after the POST screen fades).