PC keeps shutting down randomly

Hi, I have a somewhat unusual situation on my hands. A neighbor brought over an old PC—maybe ten years old? I don't know the exact specs. It wouldn't boot at all; just a steady green light on the motherboard. By some miracle, I managed to get it to start the Windows boot sequence, but right at that moment, I accidentally spilled a bit of liquid on the keyboard. Now, everything has shut down again and is completely unresponsive. If the motherboard or the power supply were dead, surely it wouldn't have started loading Windows in the first place, right? What am I looking at here? Is it just a contact issue?

PS/2 vs. USB keyboards?

I swapped in a new battery for the BIOS on my old PS/2 rig, and while it actually posts now, things feel off. It’s been acting up all night. Now I’ve hit a new wall: Windows won't boot. Every time I try to select Safe Mode, Command Prompt, or Networking, I just get this error string: multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\windows\system32\DRIVERS\... This BIOS dates back to 2003; the only boot options available are floppy or hard drive. I haven't seen a floppy disk in years, and it refuses to recognize a USB drive as bootable. Any ideas on how to fix this?

Just pop in a CD/DVD installer and run a repair to fix the MBR. Pretty straightforward stuff, you just need the installation media on hand.

If you're dealing with some big-name brand, they can be a total pain when you're just trying to install stuff on your hard drive... It's always some specific brand name or a certain model number.

Unfortunately, I don't have that specific installation on hand. I do have other versions of Windows XP; would any of those be useful? My case just says Microsoft Digital, but the motherboard is an Intel motherboard...