HP a810n and booting hassles is mobo or bios likely

I've checked the existing threads and nothing is EXACTLY the same as this. . some are similar; my kids HP a810n stopped booting and I traced it to a bad Samsung HDD. The SMART tests showed many errors and that the drive was about to go bad, ONLY after running Steve Gibson's Spinrite 6.0.

So now I've put in an old drive I have lying around and the drive appears good and will take an XP Pro install, but the system will still not boot. I've reset the bios via taking out the battery and at first still got only no boot.

Now I've reset the CMOS via the jumpers on this mobo (ASUS K8S-LA).
Now the install of XP Pro gets through its repair cycle and reboots but stops with a logon screen (something I've not seen normally) with Administrator and a password entry field. It gives up "forgotten password" word balloon if you try ENTER for no password.

I've looked and have reset the BIOS password but that doesn't seem to change the way the Win XP install proceeds.

Anybody know how the system is doing this? I'm just about to find a small format mobo at Fry's and just use the proc and memory sticks. This is frustrating. I've logged about twenty hours trying to help my son.

Chris

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major
It sounds to me like you are pressing "R" at the first screen where it says "Press Enter to set up Windows; Press R to repair a Windows installation". DO NOT PRESS "R" AT THIS SCREEN!!!! Microsoft worded this very poorly; you should press Enter at the first screen, then press "R" at the second screen where it asks how to proceed. Check out this article for a complete how-to-perform-a-repair-install-of-XP guide complete with screen shots. The guide has Windows XP Pro in the screen shots, but it's exactly the same when installing XP Home, so don't worry. One thing the guide doesn't mention is that when you see the "Press any key to boot from CD...." right at the start, you only need to do this once, the first time to start the install. You will see that prompt a few more times as setup will require a few restarts, but just ignore it after the very first time.

Good luck! I hope this helps!