BleepingComputer.com: XP wont start, black screen with cursor

Hi, I have a dell inspiron 1525 labtop. It was working fine, ran some updates then on the reboot it would not go past the post. The screen turns black with a blinking cursor at the top.
I tried unplugging everything, rebooting by taking out battery, and holding down power button.
The only menus I get are F2 and F 12, no F8.
I tried rearranging the boot order, I changed the Ram around I tried each by themselves.
I have a reinstallation cd, the repair did not work and I wasnt sure about completly redoing the installation.
It wouldnt let me put in a new partition.
I would appreciate any advice!!!!!
Thanks, Lisa

Did the repair installation start?

That model comes with a recovery partition, where did you get the installation disk?

Yeah it started, i did the repair on the current version of xp but it didnt fix it.
It was bought off the internet it my be referbished
The cd says reinstallation cd microsoft windows xp professional. Service pack 3

Let's try this. There is a second partition on the hdd, this is the recovery partition. You can access this partition by immediately pressing ctrl and F11 when you start your computer. Once the recovery begins just follow the instructions.

For future reference, you can use the installation CD to perform a repair installation. The beauty of this is that you will not lose all your data that has been added to the computer.

Tried the control f11-nothing