hard drive won't work

[Derek_17]

I have an hp 6736 and when trying to had a hard drive with windows xp. It formats the drive and installs some files then it reboots, but when it does it acts like nothing was installed and goes back to the beginning asking me if I want to install.

[Scott_121]

Does the HDD let your original operating system back on there?

[Derek_17]

This is a new hard drive with nothing on it.

[Michael Lampi]

The installation process on a brand new disk requires the drive to be partitioned and formatted. It is normal for the system to reboot once this is done so that the partitioning can be recognized by the operating system.

If you are saying that once all this is done and the system comes back up, it does not see that the hard drive is formatted and ready to be loaded with XP, then it would seem that you either have a bad disk drive or the motherboard/cpu are acting rather flaky.

[Marino Meloni_1]

Be sure you have an Active partition,
run Fdisk from Dos and active the boot partition.
if already done, may be the boot sector is corrupted, try to run in dos mode " FDISK /mbr" this undocumented command will rewrite a boot sector on the disk
marino