Ok, i, hoping someone can help, cos i dont know whereto turn...

A friend of mine owns a HP Pavilion 500a they were getting an error whereby it said No Operating System... the Hard drive was making a crunching sound etc.. i diagnosed this as a faulty Hard Drive. (I tried the Hard Drivein my PC and this confirmed it), they bought a new HardDrive and asked me to install it for them. This is where the problems start...

Firstly i had trouble installing XP it auto booted fine but then when it came to restarting the PC after the first stage of installation instead of the Setup process continuing it booted from the start again? When i switch the PC on i get a blue screen with the HP logo and nothing else, no system check etc. and when i try and press del to get to setup nothing and F8 does nothing also. Anyway i put the Hard Drive into my PC and was able to install XP.

When i put the hard drive back into the HP i get the blue screen with the HP logo and then a blank screen with a blinking underscore.

Heres what ive tried with no luck:

1. Ive tried diffrent cables
2. Ive tried a diffrent battery
3. Ive tried my own harddrive in the HP andthe same error with the blinking underscore happens.

What else could i try and what could be potentially the problem, are we looking at a motherboard failure?

Please help i dont know what else to do.
Thanks

Here's what I'd do:

1. Make sure the hard rive is properly installed, check MY COMPUTER and see that is it detected there and tit's size etc.
2. Use the hard drive utility it came iwth to FDIAK , FORMAT and prepare the drive for use, partition etc.
3. Install WIN XP onto the next Hard drive.

The problem is i cant even get to My Computer, on the HP on my PC its fine and runs XP fine. XP is installed on the hard drive, it runs on my PC but not on the HP which obviously means theres something wrong with the HP which isnt hard drive related.

Start eliminating stuff-
RAM
CD-ROM
Video card
Etc Etc

When you run out of stuff to remove you are left with the power supply or motherboard.

You could also try the HP diagnostic CD(if you have one). These usually are self booting and do not need an O/S to run. On many Dells however it will pull a variety of errors if the board is bad.

Jimi_l

I think someone once said here that branded PC's, such as HP an Dell, have proprietory hardwares pieces, which makes it difficult and more expensive to upgrade. So if wanted to upgrade the HD, you would need to get a HD from HP and not just any, coz that wont work. I think that might be the problem, but that person could have been worng, i dont know. Do some research and check it out.

if the drive will boot in your machine and not in his then you have to format and re-install xp on his machine only, windows XP was designed with a security program that checks hardware and if the hardware is too different then it will goto a blue error screen and you then have to re-install.
As for the blue HP screen try reseting the Bios settings via this jumper:
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/ca810e/ca2_confg.htm#1
Hope this helps you :-)

I think the problem may be i need to install some files that are on the HP recovery disk, does anyone know where i can download this from?

This is all I could find:
http://h20015.www2.hp.com/en/document.jhtml;jsessionid=5JMPL3Q3ASC1NQEXGR3UOSQ?reg=nam&cc=us&docName=bph07142&lc=en

Bottom of that page this link:
http://h20015.www2.hp.com/nav/sitedirector?pageType=doc&td=personal_computing&docName=bph07143&lc=en