Windows Installation Blank Screen

[Stealth]

Ok, so. I was installing windows XP, everything went fine, That blue screen showed up, I did all the settings.. While it was formatting the drive, (i selected NTFS Quick) I went away from my screen for a few minutes to get a drink and a few other things.. I came back, it was a black screen. I thought, maybe something was loading. So I went away, did a few things, Checked on it AGAIN and still a black screen >.< I am pretty sure I did nothing wrong. I was installing this on a brand new hard drive I just got. It is a "Maxtor STM3160212A 160GB DiamondMax20 ATA 2MB Cache - OEM". When I booted up the PC it detected it and everything seemed fine, and beforehand I tried out to see if an older hard drive worked that had 98 installed on it and that was fine. Now I just went down, still a blank/black screen. Nothing on it.

Anyone else experienced this? I could really use some help as i'd like to get this computer up and running tonight.

Thanks,

-- Stealth.

I've done a few things like, The jumper is in the right thing and stuff.
When I try and boot up the PC now, it doesn't get as far as it did.

Maybe if I format it outside of the windows installation, It could work? It now gets blank screen before the blue screen on which windows installs >.< How do I format outside of it?

Also I have an external hard drive thing on THIS pc. Is there a way to use this PC to install windows onto that hard drive? Maybe it will work that way? I have plugged it in, there is 2 partitions and 500mb worth of windows stuff installed which I believe is incomplete >.< if I erase this could I start windows install again on the other PC?

I hope you can help I will be on these forums for a while trying ideas people suggest..

Thanks -- Stealth.

 

[PC eye]

First there are a few things we need to look over here like a Welcome to the Computer Forum! http://www.computerforum.com/70672-official-welcome-thread.html And a friendly reminder to review the http://www.computerforum.com/52038-forum-rules.html

The XP installer never sees a black screen if the installation is going on well until the initial startup screens are seen when completed. You will want to look over the installation disk itself to see you smudged it with finger prints or the disk was scratched up. You may have also received a bad disk failing to fully copy the necessary setup files to the drive.

Besides a bad installation disk you could have received a defective hard drive as another possible item to consider. The fact that it is seen in the bios post tests would point more at the XP cd if that's a bad disk while not ruling out faults with a new drive. The one thing you can't do is format around a Windows installation when you only have one primary partition. Your problem there points at the installer simply locking up during the process of copying the needed files.

XP has to be installed from the optical drive(cd or dvd) you have the disk in unless you have a second one installed. You can't use the usb external drive as an installation tool. The new drive can be wiped at any time since you don't have anything working on it. One quesion here however is how the new drive was installed. Was it mastered at the end of the primary ide cable? If your one or more optical drives are on the secondary you could try the cable select jumper setting as a long shot to see the installer will copy the files fully onto it. One thing to try when going for the second attempt is to disable all drives but the cd or dvd drive to force boot of the installation disk. Once the setup files are seen fully copied and the auto restart happens reassign the new drive as the first in the boot order when re-enabling it.