You had replaced the hard drive on your compaq laptop and when you inserted the Windows XP disk the laptop does not respond its just a blank screen how do you install windows?

Answer 1

Windows XP does not support installation in a SATA environment. This is especially prevalent within Compaq/HP systems. The first solution is to take out the Windows CD from your CD-Rom, restart your computer and enter BIOS Hardware Configuration (by pressing a function key like f10, or del or esc... depending on your model computer/BIOS). Once in Hardware Configuration, disable Native SATA support for your CD-Rom drive. Save settings and exit BIOS. Now put in your Windows XP CD and restart your computer. It should be now be able to read the CD and continue with the installation. Does it go through the POST? (power on self test) You should see the computer send up some kind of messages that come from the BIOS as the computer attempts to boot. If the computer is just complaining that it can't find a boot sector on your hard drive, no problem. If it isn't completing the POST, you need to take care of that before you can go on. Whatever it takes for YOUR version of BIOS, you will need to get into the bios settings. Sometimes it's F8, sometimes it's ESCAPE, just watch the boot sequence and hit the appropriate key to get into the BIOS settings. Then you'll have to change the boot sequence so that the computer will attempt to boot from CD FIRST. After that, you should be able to load windows.