Some help with a HP Pavilion ze5185

[Geekling]

It starts to load up just fine. But then it gets to the blue windows XP screen and it just stops. What could be causing this? Its my cousins laptop and she only wants to reformat if she has no other option. I've tried booting into safe mode with no luck.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Donk3y]

If it wont even go into Safe Mode it sounds like hardware issue. Hard Drive or RAM maybe?