Laptop Won't Start Up And Repair Disc Won't Load Up

I'm trying to get my nephew's laptop (acer aspire 5749) to boot up (apparently battery ran out during shutdown and not worked since) - on power up it gives the option to repair or start as normal. Repair takes you (eventually) to a grey screen with wavy ribbons at the top, a moveable mouse cursor but nothing else happens (even after leaving it for 24 hours). "Start windows normally" takes you to the loading windows screen, then it reboots itself (and the repair options come up again...).

Have booted with a windows repair cd but the same grey screen/wavy ribbons thing happens again and nothing happens (even after leaving it 24 hours).

Booting into safe mode gives no joy either and stops the boot up process during the drivers loading up. It used to stop at one of the AVG drivers so I used the AVG repair utility (midnight commander) to rename all the AVG stuff but then it just stops at another driver instead (now it stops at classpnp.sys).

I've done the memory check on the AVG disk which passes fine so I'm guessing I need to run some checks on the hard disk itself. I've just downloaded the Ultimate Boot CD ( Ultimate Boot CD - Overview ) but don't know which of the utilities you'd recommend I try first?