I have a HP 512X pc, hard drive went south. Re placed hard drive and now have a major problem. When I try to load win xp this is what happens. Win xp will proceed trough the prepration stage, then reconize and format the hard drive,after all of this is done and win xp restarts to load the os system. win xp starts again from the beginning. Steps I have taken,contacted HP support tried there fix tried DR doss,and so many other ideas that are to numerous to list. Any fresh ideas?

Hi Leonard Cary!
Welcome to PC Help Forum!

So you are trying to install Windows XP in fact?
Does it copy any files to your hard drive after formatting your drive?
When it has done that, and it restart, you should not boot from CD-Rom, but from your harddisk! This is important cause the files that are copied to the harddisk after the format are the ones that are going to run your XP setup.

Bluefish

just a stupid idea: after it formats, and loads the setup files and goes to restart, during that restart process, can you jump into the bios and switch to boot from hdd to help avoid booting back up from the cd?

Hi david!
Welcome to PC Help Forum!

This in fact is what I was talking about, but it's not necessary to do because the XP CD give a message: press any key to boot from CD... So you can also keep CD-Rom as first so that you do not have to switch back next time.

Leonard, is your problem fixed?

Bluefish