I goog;ed for a number of search terms for at least 30 minutes without success before posting this thread.
Do you have more than one hard drive installed? If you have a master file table that got wiped (likely with a power interruption shutdown), it could take XP up to 20 minutes to boot while it tries to read what it thinks is a raw drive. This doesn't apply if your boot drive MFT got wiped, in which case the only recovery is to take the boot drive to another machine, install it as a secondary drive and recover the data.