PC won't boot into windows

[wseyller]

Looking at a co-workers pc today that he brought in to work because he had viruses and spyware, I was planning to remove for him.

I hooked it up here at work and it booted to the windows xp screen (one with the black background) then the screen was blank and doesn't go any farther. I tried two monitors. Power lights on both monitors stay on. Pc is still running. The second monitor I tried of course had the same result but it also made a loud clicking sound once the blank screen appeared.

I showed him this and asked him if this was happening before and he said no. Last time he saw it run was the day before at Bestbuy when he picked it up. They were repairing or replacing a cd drive for him. They show him that it was running.

Anyone got a suggestion to what the problem is.

Specs: Gateway 420GR
Pentium 4 515
onboard vid

It has a pci-express slot but I only have extra agp cards laying around so I can't test that. May OS reinstall?

 

[kitkat22]

Have you tried getting into safe mode?

 

[wseyller]

duh, that worked.

So maybe no hardware failure.

I may reinstall windows. The guy don't have anything he wants to save. He prefers a clean install.

 

[wpshooter]

Have you tried reseating video and/or all other cards ???

 

[wseyller]

well this is a weird problem. I reinstalled windows with a store bought copy and it will reboot just fine. I download the drivers from gateway. When I installed a few drivers it would not reboot except in safe mode. I restored it before drivers were install and it would boot fine again. We found the restore disk and install windows that way. Even worse would not boot into windows even the first time which is probably because the restore disk install the driver at the same time. I disconnected the modem, cd drives, all in one media drive but not luck. I believe it to be a bad motherboard. And I did reset cmos and all that.