Computer from hell

[bubbzilla]

A friend of mine asked me to reformat the harddrive in his computer. Heres the specs:
AMD 64 Athlon
1.5gb of ram (in 2 x 256mb and 2 x 512mb)
160gb IDE HDD
onboard graphics
and a 288W PSU

Ive spent the last 10 hours trying to get it to work. and i havnt gotten very far. At first, it kept turning off about a minute after booting from the XP disc. Eventually, i figured out its overheating. The temp monitor in the BIOS said it was sitting at about 100C. When it gets to 125, it turns off. So I cleaned it out, added a bunch of fans, cleaned the CPU heatsink and replaced the thermal paste, took the side off, and after all that, it was only down to like 92C in bios and still overheated when installing XP. Right now I have it running by an open window (its about -20C outside) and the bios says its about 78C. It does work, but thats hardly a practical solution. Is it possible theres something wrong with the sensor?

Well, that would seem like its enough trouble for one computer. but no. Ive finally reformatted the harddrive, which seemed to go relatively well, when it was done, it did its stuff and then restarted like it should. When it restarted, it got to the XP loading screen and now its just sitting there, endlessly loading. smae thing happens in safe mode except it sits at a giant list of directories.

I should mention that the reason im reformatting it in the first place is because when it turns on normally (this is before I did anything to it), it gets past the XP loading screen normally, then it flashes blue and restarts. If it helps, the blue screen says this:

STOP: c0000218 {Registry File Failure}
The registry cannot load the hive (file):
\SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE
or its log or alternate.
It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.

Beginning dump of physical memory
Physical memory dump complete.
Conact your system adminisstrator or technical support group for further
assistance.

Any help or advice would be much appreciated. Aside from pouring holy water on it, im pretty much out of ideas. Thanks

[hackerballs]

holy water is the way to go, make it cold water too..............

[bubbzilla]

Update: Well, heat sink is definitely installed right now. Ive tried using a different PSU, different harddrive, still nothing. I did a mem check. ram seems to be fine. After all the advice ive gotten, i think the problem is the CPU is fried causing it to overheat. If not, then its cause the motherboard is fried. If was just a matter of the sensor being wrong, I wouldnt be having all the problems with formatting and corrupt files. I have quite a few spare parts, but i do not have a spare CPU so i cant check. Does anyone know of some program that can check the CPU in boot?

[Whyzman]

So your temps are now within specs??

I would run the harddrive diagnostics.

[YODA74]

I would run the harddrive diagnostics.

Yup do that and if it says it's ok then zero the drive before reloading windows

Also take a look at this if you haven't already

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545/