Blank Screen When Booting WinXP???

[jaygee61]

Greetings Ya'll & Happy Holidays!

Okay... here's my dilemma...

I recently finished a new build and it's working fine. My old PC, an HP Pavilion 513n, was going to be parted out and sold, so I thought I'd use the HD as extra storage on the new build. So I installed it in the new build and formatted it to get rid of the original OEM install of WinXP. But then, my wife decides we should give the old PC to her daughter. So I put the old drive back in the HP and now I'm trying to do a fresh install of WinXP. I can access the BIOS on the HP and change the boot sequence fine. I set it to "boot from CD-ROM" and used my WinXP install disk and it seemed to install okay. But when I switched the boot sequence back to "boot from hard drive" and re-started the machine, all I get is a black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left.

I've used a boot utility CD and it says that WinXP is there, so why won't it start up? I should probably mention that when I removed the HD and formatted it, it had two partitions... one that was allocated for about 67 MB and the other for about 53 GB (it's a 60 GB Maxtor drive) and I formatted both of them. Do I need to remove the partitions and if so, how do I go about that?

Another odd thing is that the mobo is an OEM Asus P48266-M almost identical to this one. Except that there are no CMOS or BIOS jumpers!!! I went over the board with a fine-tooth comb, and they're not there!

So that's pretty much it. Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks!

[Panama Red]

The small partition was originally the HP restore partition. During the XP install you have the option to Delete partitons one at a time. This effectively combines all the disk space into one unpartitioned space. Then you select to install on that unpartitoned space or create a new partition on the unpartitioned space. Either way, you'll then be give the option to format the primary partition before the installation of XP. Choose NTFS format. I'd recommend disconnecting any front panel usb connections from the mobo prior to a fresh install. Reconnect after the first boot and after all the drivers are installed.

[endfoulks]

To format both Partitions I use a Win 98 Bootdisk and go into FDISK.EXE. from here you can format and create partitions (should have done this before XP install). It you will probbly have to reinstall XP and reformat, but not sure as i never had that prob. before.

[Panama Red]

Originally Posted by endfoulks To format both Partitions I use a Win 98 Bootdisk and go into FDISK.EXE. from here you can format and create partitions (should have done this before XP install). It you will probbly have to reinstall XP and reformat, but not sure as i never had that prob. before.

Not necessary with XP, ef. You can do all the formatting and partition removal with the XP CD. Plus with FDISK, you can't see NTFS partitions nor can you format new partitions in NTFS, only FAT32. That's fine for Win 98 and older but XP should be installed on NTFS partitions. Oh yeah, FDISK has hdd size limits too so, depending on the hdd you're using, you may not see it all and you'll end up creating partitions based on the limits imposed by FDISK rather than the sizes you desire. To each his own but I prefer to use the XP disk.