Problems occurring with my brother's HP notebook

[NukaCola]

My brother hasn't updated XP in a while. He downloaded what the GDI + Advantage from Microsoft, and that in turn downloaded more security updates. When asked to restart, he clicked no because he had some other things to work on. He continues working, and then suddenly his computer starts lagging and it freezes up.

He can't restart the computer so he turns it off. When he goes back to turn it on, it does a hard drive check, but it couldn't finish it because he didn't have enough HDD space left on it (he had 500MB left). After that happens, it goes to "Windows Has Encountered a Problem" (Black Screen) He selects "Continue Windows Normally." But then it goes right back to the boot screen and back to the menu. He selects "Boot Windows XP to last known good config" and it all happens again, so he tries Safe Mode and then it just goes back again.

My brother tries F11 for System Recovery but it states that it's going to reformat the drive and only keep the drive at the last Recovery point, but my brother panics and shuts off the machine. When he turns it back on, it won't even go to the boot menu to start a Windows selection. It'll just keep that process going over and over.

So what can he do?

 

[TheStu]

Pull the drive, gat an enclosure, back up the drive, put drive back in, format, install XP, install AV, UPDATE till it is done, then reinstall apps.

That is a worst case scenario that you should keep in mind in the event no one else has any brighter ideas, I usually follow that procedure, but then I also usually partition my drives, so I only give Windows maybe 20-30GB for it and major apps, then if I ever do have to reformat, I can get away with only formatting that partition instead of the whole drive.