Windows Vista Wont Boot On Laptop

I am helping a friend out by trying to fix his laptop, I have already fully experimented and got to quite a few screens but it just wont boot.

The batterys almost dead and I dont have the cords so I will just describe what is happening, and hopefully from that I can get some advice on some things I could try, or if I will no doubt need to get the Vista OS CD and repair it...

You turn it on and everything goes normal, and then it says Windows cannot boot normally, there was a problem etc etc...

It lets you choose how to boot, booting normally it goes to the loading users screen and loads up.

Booting in safe mode loads up a background with the words safe mode in all corners, and a cursor but thats it, nothing else, and after a few minutes the cursor completely disappears and does not come back.

Booting in safe mode with command prompt seems to take quite a while to finally pop up a command prompt, but it actually functions... sort of. I ran a command to check the system or whatever I forgot what it was exactly, and it started flashing through items it was checking, looking good, and then it gets to something like Checking Page File... and never gets past checking that.

I tried to get into the Bios but they were password protected .

His laptop was just recently dropped on concrete too by this old dude we work with haha, I was there, I was suprised the laptop still functioned as normal after that... but maybe now its causing something to act up.

What is the pagefile anyways?

You might have a busted hdd. You can just use hiren boot cd and run the diagnostic on most of your hardware.

It wouldn't be busted but more like maybe the disk got real messed up from the impact and messed up a portion of it right? Because the thing is still able to give me a read out of files if I run dir, etc...

I will google Hiren Boot CD.