This sounds like the computer is locking up on the Advanced OS options screen, which could be hardware or the OS, or a virus.
Usually it is a file system problem - which means that the hard drive's file system has gone awry. You will need a Windows boot disk to see if you can use Check Disk on your hard drive. It is also possible your hard drive is trashed - hopefully you have backed up your important data such as pictures, music, documents, downloads, favorites, and the like.
Here is a very good boot CD image that you can use - just download it, burn it with Windows (Win 7 and above can burn ISO images to disk) or use Nero or a program like that to burn the image to CD - you can't just copy it to the CD - it needs to be burned as an image.
http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/Here are some comments that will help you too:
http://ask.metafilter.com/222181/How-can-I-fix-my-XP-computer-from-UBCDHope that helps!
Dave
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