WinXP Install Problem - Screen Goes Black at Hitting Ket to Boot from CD

[timmer545]

I have an HP Pivilion Slimline s7421c PC that was recently given to me. I had to replace the hard drive because it failed the SMART test & new DVD Drive; both SATA. When I attempt to install WinXP, after I hit a key to install from CD, my screen goes blank and it does not load from the DVD drive. I have tested the DVD drive, hard drive and WinXP boot installation on another system and all are fine. I've checked BIOS and believe I have all the proper selections; all hardware is properly detected (hard drive, DVD, Memeory). But for some reason the screen simply goes blank at that point; when it should be loading WinXP to begin installation. At this point I don't even know what to try next. I'm wondering if possibly the MB is bad. There appears to be no option in BIOS to load from USB or I would try that.

Is this a BIOS issue. My BIOS offers very few options.

[timmer545]

Problem Solved! Thanks to everyone. Let me report what my problem was in hopes it might help others.

I connected the hard drive to another system and reformatted to NTFS from Win7. I did an extended test using Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostics and it passed. Since someone had mentioned that my problem may have been caused from a bad MBR and since it was already connected to another system, I used TestDisk to write zeros to the MBR. I don't know if this was necessary, but that's what I did.

As a note, and something that may have caused the problem, but I admit if it did, I don't understand why, the drive had a C:\Windows directory. I thought I'd grabbed a drive that had already been reformatted but I was wrong (I had mislabeled it with a sticky note). I now believe it was a drive I had used for an early beta version of Win7 and then removed from my system.

Thanks again.