old Pentium 4 no hard drive

[eurobike]

Hi everyone, excuse me if I am posting in the wrong place but I am new to this.I have got hold of a Compaq p4 with no hard drive.I would like to use it with windows XP or a later o/s on it.I put a new hard drive in it (formatted to NFTS) but when I boot it up My display stays black.Should I see anything on display? Or could it be a problem with the graphics card?

[gerbil]

Heya, euro. That sys has integrated graphics... ie. they are a part of the mb chipset, and not a plug-in card.
Yes, you should see the BIOS run, or try to.... it could be the power supply not providing correct voltages, mb, RAM, cpu, the display. Or a corrupted BIOS. If anything else was failing I think BIOS would at least run and indicate the problem.

[mjdodd]

I know this sounds corny but have you actually got anything on the hard drive apart from NTFS format. if the machine cant see a boot sector its going nowhere fast. Have you tied using a bootable CD like linux to see if the drive is OK?
Another possibility I use a lot is a 'carrier box' into which one can put a hard dirve and then run it from usb. These ar enot expensive and can help sort out if the drive is working... or put it in another comuter.
M

[eurobike]

Thanks for your replies. will see if it will boot from Linux the PC has a graphics card. My hardware experience up to now has upgrading ram & installing operating systems so thanks again for your helpful posts.

[gerbil]

"if the machine cant see a boot sector" then the MBR [there is one on the disk because he formatted it] will pop the relevent message.
Pull the graphics card... google tells me it has integrated graphics, so there is a means to test that card.