stuck at safe mode screen

[OUKNO]

Needing help from you Guru's
Here's the deal my son calls from his moms house and says his computer keeps going to the safe mode screen so I pick the PC up & sure enough no matter what you do it stays at safe mode screen if you try to start in Safe Mode, Normal,.... it flickers for a second and goes right back to the safe mode screen.
The PC is a Emachine (not fond of them but its what he has.
So I'm thinking it's a hard drive issue, I grab a preloaded XP pro with all of the goodies that I had lying around slap it into the Emachine and same thing happens so I guess I was wrong about the hard drive idea.
Can any one please help me with some other suggestions to fix the this problem?

Thanks,
Matt

[OUKNO]

I have searched for this issue by the way and have been able to come up with a fix for this, maybe I worded wrong but figgured I would ask.

[TheBuzzer]

So did you format the comp with the preloaded xp cd? Make sure you boot from the cd to format.

[OUKNO]

I actually installed a perfectly working hard drive from another PC
I'm possitive that the hard drive is good, but I haven't tried reinstalling the XP Pro Cd to boot from Cd.
Should I or would this be caused from another issue?

So my luck I give my son my desktop to use while his is crashed and then my notebooks hard drive all of a sudden decides to quit on me WOOHOO...