Curious PC problem.

[Ease]

My friend had a virus of some sort (I never saw it) and then found that he couldn't turn on his PC. It POSTed, but then came up with a load of errors (which unfortunately I can't remember).

We tried booting it from an XP setup disk, and it began to load all of the setup files before suddenly BSODing. I know that's not a lot to go off, but what do you reckon the problem could be? Bad hard-drive? Or mobo? This one really has me stumped!

 

[arknor]

corrupt bios?

 

[bJN]

Sounds as if something nasty has gotten into the system and messed around a fair bit. If you can try resetting the motherboard and install the OS onto a new hard drive - if that works then it takes out the problem of any hardware errors apart from the perhaps corrupt motherboard.
The BSOD is likely RAM-related so if its possible you might want to check each individual stick in another machine and use memtest just to be sure.

Other than that I'm not sure what else to suggest...