Black screen with blinking cursor following schedule of avast boot scan

[MaryFran]

At this time I'm trying to locate the disc.  Of the three Window's discs that came with the Dell none are labled recovery disc.  There is a Reinstallation CD for Service Pack 2, for Service Pack 3 and one for Vista 32BIT SP1.  The computer was running XP, not Vista.  Should I be looking for a differently labeled disc or using one of these three to boot from?

[doktornotor]

No idea, probably not for the XP one and even then it requires manual fixing via Recovery Console. No point in writing the instructions here until you try whether at least one of the XP ones is bootable.