Problem with reinstall

Evening chaps,

Having a spot of bother with this new hard drive I bought for my brothers pc. The 60gb Maxtor that was in it finally gave up which I had originally salvaged from a Tiny PC. So I have a new 120gb Maxtor sitting here atm.

Ok I went through the usually malarky with a new hard disk, fired up fdisk and formatted it subsequently. Using the smartdrv.exe way around loading the XP installation I started to install windows.

Now when I get asked to reset for the first time it reboots ok then after a few seconds the machine just sits with a flashing underscore in the top left hand corner. No activity, no reading of drives, no asking to insert a disk - no nothing.

Does anyone have ANY idea what the flock is going on? Could it be the hard disk? Some other faulty equipment?

Any help would be mightily appreciated :)

When does it stop? When it normally starts loading Windows? When you see the IDE drives, etc.?

At present there is no OS on the hard drive. It stops after the POST screen and after it finds the devices on the IDE channels then changes screen when it would normally run through the boot sequency to look for a boot record on floppies, hard disks or cdroms.

After looking for one on the floppy it just sits there with the flashing underscore in the top left hand corner and does nothing.

Really is annoying me now!

Sounds like you may have a cable in the wrong way.

Yep sounds like the bios is having probs with one of the drives,check cables,bios auto detect etc.

have you made sure that the cdrom drive or the hard drive are in the boot process, in bios.