Windows half installs, blank screen after BIOS screen

[chien_fu]

So I've had this computer for almost a year:
HP Pavillion a1250n
250G Maxtor HDD
2x 512mb DDR 3200 ram 400Hz (1Gig)

Brought to it's knees this weekend enexpectedly, I am attempting to install Windows XP Pro. I have used the maxtor diagnostic util to wipe the HDD to all zeroes, leaving one big unpartitioned space.

When I boot from the Windows XP CD it goes though the install just fine, formats the space, and copies the files, seemingly alright. When it reboots, it goes through the whole BIOS screen fine, it again asks to press any key to boot from CD, and if nothing is pressed goes directly to a blank screen, no cursor, no loading, nothing. Leaving it for up to an hour does nothing. Monitor is on, and signal seems active, but nothing is coming though.

I can access recovery console, but I'm getting in over my head at that point. Can anything in there help me?

Any advice is good advice, I messed with this all weekend long and it is getting old.
Thanks

 

[Ididmyc600]

Hi

When the PC reboots after copying files it should then read from the boot device, it may be possible that the BIOS is set incorrectly with the boot device not being set as the bootable drive.

Go into BIOS and ensure that the first bootable device is the HD you are loading windows onto, also remove any devices attached to the bootable drive such as any slave drives and that the jumper is set to master, not slave or cable select, if the CD rom that you are loading windows from is slaved to the master drive then place it on its own IDE channel and rerun the setup from scratch.

The only other time I have seen this happen is when the drive itself is flaky, that was only once though and I had to replace the drive.

Regards