[RPepper]

My brother took his hard drive out of his compaq c300 and tried to take it out of the brakets and ended up braking it. I went on ebay bought a new hard drive for this model (it has an adapter built on it) and then put it in the computer. I also picked up a windows xp disk and tried to get it to install on the hd. I keep getting this screen: It's all black with the writing of
Intel UNDI, PXE-2.0 (build 082)
Copyright © 1997-2000 Intel Corporation
For Realtek RTL8139(X)/8130/810X PCI Fast Ethernet Controller v2.13 (020326)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-MOF: Exiting PXE ROM.
Invalid Partition table.
Now I never mess around with PC's I usually stick to Mac's. I'm not sure what i need or need to do. I tried to boot from the cd by moving the boot order to CD-Rom. If you can help i'd be greatly appreciative. Thanks in advance.

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Hi and welcome to geeks to go.

The PXE errors and the referance to the ethernet controller indicate (but not always) that the computer is trying to boot from a network drive.
Go back into the bios and be sure that the boot order is cd drive first, then hard drive.

If that doesn't work, see if you can find anything in the bios to the effect of "bios defaults". Without a manual, it is hard to give you better directions on whether it has a default setting.

[123Runner]

Hi and welcome to geeks to go.

The PXE errors and the referance to the ethernet controller indicate (but not always) that the computer is trying to boot from a network drive.
Go back into the bios and be sure that the boot order is cd drive first, then hard drive.

If that doesn't work, see if you can find anything in the bios to the effect of "bios defaults". Without a manual, it is hard to give you better directions on whether it has a default setting.

[RPepper]

Thanks for the welcome,
I pressed F10 which gives me the bios and i went to restore to default settings. It is still doing the same thing. i also disabled everything wireless on my laptop, i am actually thinking of taking out the wifi card now. It is still doing the same thing. The hard drive being new with nothing installed on it, does that have an affect on it? like i said i am decent with macs but not PC's.

[123Runner]

This error has been tricky to resolve.

Is the hard drive seen in the bios?
Is the cd drive seen in the bios?
When you boot up, are you getting something to the effect of "press any key to boot from cd"?

Have you tried removing the drive, inspecting how it connects and then reinstalling?

[RPepper]

on the bios main i don't see the HD or Optical Drive. I only see the processor type and procesosr speed along with memory and a few other things. I did a primary hard disk self test and it was fine. The hard drive has some kind of adapter built on the end of it, not like i'm used to.

[RPepper]

do i need to maybe format my HD since it was cleared when i bought it? if so how do i do that? Thanks.