The problem most likely is that the boot order has the hard drive set as the first item. With no boot information on the drive since it hasn't been OSed yet that is all you will see when trying to boot from. If you take a working system and change the boot order to boot from a second drive used for storage only you will also see the flashing _ in the upper left hand corner and nothing else.
Are you familiar with partitioning and formatting a new hard drive? First if you have never used any partitioning tool like Partition Magic or the free Linux tool GParted you will have to use the XP installer to see a new primary partition created and formatted when the installer later copies the Windows setup files onto the drive itself.
Some boards will see a boot device menu where you can leave the HD set as default and choose from a menu for the one session boot from a floppy, optical, or another hard drive. That can be the F8 key just like the Windows boot menu uses or another assigned to bring that up. Refer to the board's user manual or online support to see if that option is included.
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