OT - Flash drive checking

[David Fletcher]

There's a lady in distress on another (non-technical) mail list. At first I 
thought there might be a chance of recruiting a new Ubuntu user but now I'm 
not sure.

The machine in question is an Acer notebook which I'm told has a flash drive 
not a HDD. It's just over a year old and has XP installed. She says:-

<quote>
The screen has a message on it, saying something like:" Windows did not start 
succesfully, a recent hardware or software change might have caused this". It 
then offers four options to use to boot up the computer:

Safe Mode
Safe Mode with Networking
Safe Mode with Command Prompt

Last Known Good Configuration

Start Windows Normally.

To be honest, none of the options allows this screen to disappear, and there 
can't possibly have been any hardware or software changes because he only 
ever uses it to check emails, he doesn't even play games on it! We've tried 
Googling all the possible ways to restore it, but to no avail. It's running 
on Windows XP. Can anyone please help?
<\quote>

What I'm wondering is, whether there's a possibility of the flash drive having 
died (which I suppose would constitute a hardware change :-D ), and if so is 
there any way to test it? I'm guessing that if this is possible it would 
involve getting into the BIOS to set it to boot from a USB flash drive.

Thanks,

Dave