I'll try to keep this as short and yet, thorough as possible. My mom called me (she thinks I know stuff) because her PC would not boot up. She gets the black screen with lots of white letters on it and then that's as far as it will go. Will not let her start up in safe mode. We have no rescue disks, no backups, etc. We do not even have the original XP disk. My question is....are we doomed without any disks or is there a way to reboot without such? Thanks in advance. I just found this site today and have been enjoying it. TGIF!

If she is not getting any error from the OS, like missing file..., it's usually a hard drive failure. Which you will get a message like no operating system found, or not boot device.

If you can do a little more diagnostics we can help you more.
Check the BIOS, sees the hard drive and is set to boot to it.
If you can get in the computer, check the cables are not loose. The hard drive is not unusually loud. Download and run a hard disk test utility.

Here's a link to the Ultimate Boot CD. You can boot and run several diagnostics tests from it.
http://www.syschat.com/download108.html

Thanks for this.....I'm heading over there tomorrow to see if I can make some sense of any of it.....will check in again. Have a great weekend!