I have inherited a similar problem to this thread from my brother-in-law who threw his laptop at me yesterday saying that it wouldn't boot up.
And it wouldn't, not in normal mode, last known working setting or safe mode. Each time windows loaded the laptop rebooted, there was a very quick (literally 1 microsecond) of an error message just prior to this

'Leave it with me' says I

I have the recovery disk and attempted a clean re-install; did the quick format to no avail: windows still refuse to boot insisting that some file was corrupt and to try and reinstall that file - er, how like?

So, I went for the full format and it has taken all night to get to 4% - at this rate it will be the new year before it completes

so the help I need is this?

1. should I have deleted the existing partitions as greysts suggested in the above link

2. does it normally take forever to format the laptop

for assistance the screen is displaying the following at the moment

Windows XP Home Edition Set UP
Please wait while setup formats the partition
c:Partition1 [NTFS] 38146 MB (37632 MB free)
on 38155 MB disk 0 at ID 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]

status bar = setup is formatting - 4%

Thanks in advance

ps at work at the moment so have left the stupid thing running at home but it will be 6.30 pm before I can get in front of it again