My friend is running a relatively old (6 yrs) laptop which he dual boots between Windows and Mandrake. As of recently, however, it doesn't boot at all into either operating system. In fact, the boot process never even makes it to the boot loader. It seems to die immediately before the boot loader in the initialization. Was I right in telling him that this was likely a hardware problem, not a software issue? I told him that perhaps flashing the BIOS would help, but that I'm not sure how he'd do it in a non-booting computer.

Any suggestions, or alternative diagnosis'?

Not even making to the boot loader? Yeah, it's most likely dead. Toss it. After 6 years any number of pieces of hardware could have died. Including the processor.

After 6 years of use, it's very possible that it's time to say farewell to that laptop and send it to the graveyard. I would suggest however that you at least try to boot from a Live CD such as Knoppix (assuming the laptop can boot from CD) to see if that works. In theory, if the hard drive is dead but the other components were OK, you could just replace the hard drive, reinstall the OS's, and be back in business. Even so, if I were in your shoes I'd probably conclude that rather than trying to save the old machine, it's time for a new one. In my experience, I consider the usable lifespan of a PC to be about 5 or 6 years, so you got your money's worth for sure