Laptop booting issues

[Cauncie]

Hi guys, i'm guessing that this is hardware related, plus it's about the closest i could get to "my laptop's crashed and i have no idea why".

A few days ago my other laptop was working fine, then my dad tried to turn it on, the bios came up and then it kinda stops doing anything. Have tried booting it a few times and get the same problem. Then i decided to try my usual fix of reinstalling windows xp onto a separate partition of the hard drive. That boots as far as "Setup is detecting your systems hardware configuration..." and then kinda stops too.

When i say kinda stops i mean that the keyboard stops responding and the screen remains blank, but the machine itself is still running, it's just not advancing to boot up windows xp.

My best guess (aside from the fact that the machine is dated) is that the hard drive has been done in somehow.
Can anyone tell me what this is and how to fix it please?

[Sodaen]

Make sure plug and play OS is enabled in BIOS. Might even want to try resetting to factory settings.