XP will not boot

My son has a Dell laptop running XP Pro that will not boot and I believe he has a virus. I got the laptop to boot to the desktop one time, but it took 10 minutes. Then as it was redrawing the icons it blue screened and said that there was a problem and to remove my anti-virus and firewall software. Now the system only boots to the Windows XP logo screen and then freezes. I used a recovery disk, but that did not work. I also tried Power Suite Pro, but once again had no success. I am thinking we may need to blow out the hard drive and start over, but I wanted to check with you first. Thank you for your time and support.

As you cannot get the system to boot up, it is most likely either terribly infected or it has a hardware problem. Without logs, which obviously cannot be produced on an unbootable system, there is no way that we can remotely ascertain which particular issue is causing the system's problems. A reformat and reinstallation of the operating system may resolve the problem. If not, then you will probably need to take it into a trusted local shop where you can get a more definitive diagnosis.

As this issue is beyond the scope of this forum, this topic is now closed.