[ubuntu-in] Unable to boot into hard drive or using a live cd

[Biswajit Dutta Baruah]

Dear Friends,

I have an old amd64 based desktop at home. Until sometime ago it was 
working fine, dual booting ubuntu and win xp. The power unit failed and 
I called a local computer guy to repair it. He took down the system, and 
reported back saying that the power unit, gpu, usb ports and the 
ethernet card were all konked out. When I pointed out that everything 
cannot fail at the same time, he looked into the matter ...he took 
almost a week with. When he returned the system, he ridiculed me for 
having bought a 64 but system declaring that it was a big flop. He had 
had wiped out the entire hard drive, installed win xp and said that the 
cd drive was behaving funny. The usb ports are not working and the 
ethernet card was failing as well. He had removed the nvidia graphics 
card saying the system would not boot with it.

He left the system at home for me to tinker with. I found the system was 
indeed behaving in a peculiar manner. The ethernet card was working 
fine. But if the driver upgraded, then it would stoop working. I had to 
unroll the driver. The USB ports were working fine but they would not 
charge up, for example the creative zen or the ipod touch. The cd drive 
would sometime not close or open, but was reading cd's just about fine.

But the most difficult problem was that it was refusing to boot into the 
live xubuntu cd that I intended to install. When booting in the verbose 
method, it would stop at the following lines:
   

After many attempts, I entered the BIOS screen and restored all 
defaults. Suddenly the system booted into the live cd and I proceeded 
with my installation. I thought if this was the problem, then I must be 
able to reproduce it, so I made a few changes in the BIOS settings and 
the system would halt during the boot process. So I reverted back to the 
default settings in BIOS, but now the system refuses to boot either into 
the hard drive or the live cd!

What do I do now? The system is completely inaccessible from the xubuntu 
side. But all along, I can still boot into win xp.

Bios is ambios
processor is amd athlon xp
ram is 512 MB
hdd 200gb
motherboard - don't know
keyboard working
cdrom benq working
ethernet card via working
usb ports working partially - don't charge even when booted into win xp
ps2 mouse not working, if I plug it in, the keyboard stops responding, 
so am using a remote usb optical mouse (cell something)

Biswajit D Baruah
aka orthodoc