System crash

I am sorry if this has been covered before, however if it has, I can't find it. I have a friend's computer. The OS has completely crashed, I put the OS disk in but the computer won't read that either. Where do I start? I already tried to boot the thing.

When you turn the computer on what does it do? Do you just get a black screen with no beeps, or does it beep and load the bios screen? Which OS are you using?

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I am getting the BIOS screen, I have XP.

If you can navigate through the BIOS look for the Boot Order and make sure the first boot device is the CD-Rom then try booting from the CD again.

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walk us through exactly what happens when you turn on the computer. there could be a possibility that you could fix it without having to reformat but it depends on what the problem is.

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