lee
Hi, I saw a computer hp310a in a second hand shop for sale, very cheep so I went in and paid for it. A friend of mine opened the back and saw the hard drive was missing so I went to cex computor exchange shop in London and paid £12 for a 20gbz and fitted it in. Everything was going as it should have until the XP boot CD ended its program, nothing happened, just the CD rom was asked to do the whole thing again, so we did, and the same thing happened again, 5 times we tried, please please could you give me any advise you could before I am forced to go in a shop and pay money that I really cannot afford?

You need to obtain and install Windows. The hard drive is blank when you buy it, unlike a complete computer. I would think you would be better off buying a complete and working second hand PC.

How far did the setup program take you in the process?? and was the harddrive completely partitioned before installation of Windows XP?

A few possibilities;

1) Have you set up the BIOS to recognise the hard drive, and to use it as the primary boot device? Make sure that this is set; it might keep booting from the CD simply because that's what it's set to do.

2) Perhaps the motherboard is old, and cannot support a hard drive as large as yours, or with partitions as large as you've set. Try setting the drive with a number of smaller partitions, see if that helps.

3) Ask a friend to burn you a CD with Knoppix (a free LINUX operating system that runs entirely from CD) and try using that. If it works, see if you can use the hard drive in this. It may be that the hard drive is faulty, or mis-configured... And even if not, you can use Knoppix until you get the problem solved.

4) If you purchased your copy of Windows yourself, try ringing customer support. It may be that there is a fault with your disc, and it may be that you need a new/different disc.

5) Basically, start from scratch: Delete all partitions on the hard drive (I believe Windows XP setup let's you do this), create a new one, and install again, and see what happens.

If you need extra information on how to do any of the above; ahh well, that's another question.