You will have to activate it by phone, MS changed their activation scheme to where any time a OEM key from a major vendor was used with a vanilla OEM disk it had to be called in and manually confirmed. But yes, as long as you have an OEM disk of whatever copy of XP the key is for, it will work.
One quick way to rule out a software issue would be to boot up with a Knoppix disk, go through its shutdown sequence and see if you can duplicate the problem.
Short answer? He won't.
Long answer? It's not particularly likely, but sometimes you can coax the things back to life for a brief period. From time to time the "refrigerate" and "twist" tricks will goad a drive into working long enough to do a simple data recovery.
Sometimes on that boot menu an option comes up to disable automatic restart, which is what is preventing you from seeing the error, check that.
If you have an XP disk handy you can boot into the recovery console and then run the chkdsk command on the hard drive. Sometimes that comes up...
Do you absolutely have to use MSPaint? It's okay if you need a quick and dirty way to fiddle with an image, but compared to even free image editors out there, using it as a primary image editor is like trying to eat a meal with your elbows instead of a fork.
Paint.net and The GIMP for...
The HDD power connectors (molex) should be firm in the power port, but they generally don't have any kind of clip that retains them like the ATX motherboard plug.
The first thing I would try would be a full memory diagnostic. I like to use memtest86+ from a bootable CD. You can get an ISO...
Second Booyah's suggestion to run a full scan on the drive. If you don't have the diagnostic software for your hard drive, grab and burn an ISO from http://www.ultimatebootcd.com and chose the diagnostic from your drive's manufacturer.
If the drive doesn't appear in your BIOS listing...
If the bootsector of the cdrom can still be read, you can use a program like ISObuster to extract the bootable image file, and then use Nero or whatever burning program you have to use that image file along with the CD's remaining data files to create a bootable CD.
The process similar to...
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