Thought I would get my Dad a cheap computer so got the chance to buy a HP T760 tower, It was all working fine apart from when i went to put windows xp home onto it. What happened was it loaded all the windows files then when it went to reboot that was it just gets to the HP splash screen and will not go any further.

I have tried hiting F1 but it just says "entering setup" and stays like that. I tried another stick of 512 ddr 400 and that didnt do anything, I have checked the hard drive for errors and again all comes back fine.

The PC has the following spec.

Pentium 4 515 cpu (2.9 GHZ)

512Mb ddr400 ram

Radeon 128Mb graphics card (no on board graphics)

160GB sata harddrive

Just wondered if any of you guys have any ideas, I have cleared the Bios with the jumper pins but this doesnt help either, Cant get over my luck It was working but wanted all the hp crap of so decided to format the drive and do a full clean install. When i have put the harddrive into another machine it does show a windows folder but thats it.

Any help with this would be great as its certainly got me wondering - Cheers

What service pack version of XP?? The early ones dont like SATA drives; I think you need SP2 or later to stand a chance of it working.

If you have a spare, chuck in a PATA (IDE) drive, and install XP on that; if it works, you know it is the SP version causing the problem.

Try booting it with only the cpu and graphics card connected - so no RAM, hard drive or CD.

If you can get into the BIOS with nothing connected, you know it's something stopping the boot. Like GentleGiant suggested, my money would be on the SATA HD.

Also, stupid thing, make sure there is nothing plugged into the pc when you try booting it. My Compaq laptop will not boot if my sony erricson xperia x10 is connected via USB...just sits on the compaq splash screen, Thought it wa a fault..uplugged all USB and all of a sudden it went!!

What do you mean when you say 'I have cleared the Bios with the jumper pins but this doesnt help either'?

Can you select the boot option i.e. boot from HDD or CD ROM? Have you tried booting from HDD after the original install?

It was the service pack 2 issue as i put in an old 40 gig ide drive and had no problems installing windows, how on earth did HP get it to install i do not know.

My XP disk is service pack 1 and i have a separate disk with service pack 2 on it, is there a windows xp disk available with service pack 2 on the same disk, just thinking for future use.

The sata drive would even install vista, but i don't want that on this machine but it confirmed that its a problem with my service pack 1 xp disk.

It was the service pack 2 issue as i put in an old 40 gig ide drive and had no problems installing windows, how on earth did HP get it to install i do not know.

My XP disk is service pack 1 and i have a separate disk with service pack 2 on it, is there a windows xp disk available with service pack 2 on the same disk, just thinking for future use.

The sata drive would even install vista, but i don't want that on this machine but it confirmed that its a problem with my service pack 1 xp disk.

If you've only got an XP disc with SP1, you could create one with SP3 with nlite

Firstly you'll need to download the service pack from here

Then follow the guide here for slipstreaming the service pack.

Burn the ISO as normal, and hey-presto you have an XP cd with SP3.

Going back to the original problem, as I see it is that the machine refuses to boot with the disk attach once you had started your XP install.

The error I am assume is after it hangs for a long time is to report that the disk can't be detected? I recently had to deal with a Dell like this. I was able to read the disk in a USB device, or when I put the disk on the seconary ATA channel slaved with the dvd it would (but *very* slowly).

I concluded the disk was knackered and bought a new disk. Whacked the few disk in and lightening speeds occured. I then struggled more to reinstall XP Home using the Dell Windows XP Home key as it did not like my MSDN XP disks, and I had to torrent myself a copy of a Dell install disk which worked perfectly. PITA.

My Father has a Dell which sometimes forgets/fails to detect the secondary SATA disk, I have to get him to pop into the BIOS, disable the disk, reboot, reenable it, reboot and then all is good. Most odd.

However your suggesting the machine detected the disk, but refused to boot? I would wonder if the boot sequence for devices/ATA/SATA/USB was wrong in the bios, or if the machine was trying to boot from another device USB stick/etc?

Going back to the original problem, as I see it is that the machine refuses to boot with the disk attach once you had started your XP install.

The error I am assume is after it hangs for a long time is to report that the disk can't be detected? I recently had to deal with a Dell like this. I was able to read the disk in a USB device, or when I put the disk on the seconary ATA channel slaved with the dvd it would (but *very* slowly).

I concluded the disk was knackered and bought a new disk. Whacked the few disk in and lightening speeds occured. I then struggled more to reinstall XP Home using the Dell Windows XP Home key as it did not like my MSDN XP disks, and I had to torrent myself a copy of a Dell install disk which worked perfectly. PITA.

My Father has a Dell which sometimes forgets/fails to detect the secondary SATA disk, I have to get him to pop into the BIOS, disable the disk, reboot, reenable it, reboot and then all is good. Most odd.

However your suggesting the machine detected the disk, but refused to boot? I would wonder if the boot sequence for devices/ATA/SATA/USB was wrong in the bios, or if the machine was trying to boot from another device USB stick/etc?

Read the post properly, he was using an XP SP1 disk, XP didnt have SATA support until SP2. I suspect they sent out "old" SP1 recovery disks until they had used them up, I have just had exactly the same problem with an EeePC, the version of XP included did not recognise the 4Gb SSD on the mobo and installed, but refused to boot.

Eventually I gave up and downloaded TinyXP ver. 10; which includes the Full SP3 install as well as several stripped out install versions of XP.

Read the post properly, he was using an XP SP1 disk, XP didnt have SATA support until SP2. I suspect they sent out "old" SP1 recovery disks until they had used them up, I have just had exactly the same problem with an EeePC, the version of XP included did not recognise the 4Gb SSD on the mobo and installed, but refused to boot.

Eventually I gave up and downloaded TinyXP ver. 10; which includes the Full SP3 install as well as several stripped out install versions of XP.

Yes, I read this bit:

What happened was it loaded all the windows files then when it went to reboot that was it just gets to the HP splash screen and will not go any further.

That suggest the machine gets stuck before it attempt to boot an OS, otherwise I would expect to see a message like "please insert a boot disk" or similar.. Anyway, XP without support for sata, I would expect a BSoD with inaccessible boot device style message.

Pre SP2 almost supports SATA drives; it will start to read the HDD, THEN stall or give an error. I had several different responses when I was trying to install the image files; sometimes it would stall on the splash screen, sometimes it would tell me that "X" or "Y" file was missing (they were there I checked); sometimes it would throw an error number at me and sometimes it would say "no bootdisk".

As soon as I found and stuck a SP2 disk in it worked perfectly.