is this a bios battery problem?

Hi
My friend just brought me his PC because it wasnt starting up, the hard drive appears to boot (still it makes a funny noise) but afterwards the screen just turns black, i tried everything and i thought that in the end the problem was with the hdd so to be sure i replaced it with one that i had with windows xp installed and it didnt startup either, but the problem with this one was that when ever the windows logo showed up, a blue screen will appear and the computer rebooted.
So is this a problem with the bios battery? or is it something else.