After trying the press the cover trick, the machine booted right up into windows Xp without any problem. I am able to use the machine now, but haven't tried the restart or moving it yet.

Hi, I am trying to fix my friends computer. He was experiencing system slowdown due to some virus/trojan horse infection. After a while he suddenly had the machine not booting with an error message (he doesn't remember what it was). Then a few tries later, it would no longer give the error message. ...