Laptop booting problem.

I was reinstalling XP on a laptop when I got a stop error. I think the HDD might be bad so I want to do a chkdsk.

When I boot it up now though, i can't get past the "press F1 for bios" screen.
As soon as it gets past that the screen goes black and there's a white cursor in the top left that flashes.

How can I boot from CD again to get XP installed again or run some diagnostics?

It's a 1.6ghz intel P4 with 512mb ram and a 30gig 5200rpm HDD.

 

change the boot order in the BIOS to boot from the CD first

what's the stop error? here's a list of them:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d..._f55acfed-3296-4e84-8885-c3162fd0ddbf.xml.asp

 

I don't know the stop error and I feel really dumb for not remembering it.

I had another go at it with CD as first boot device. It installed windows up to the point where it had finished copying system folders (the blue screen bit).
Then it would not go any further, just the blank screen and cursor again.

So I ran a disk repair from a Boot CD (Hiren's boot CD) and it found lots and lots of bad sectors (I'm talking thousands possibly). It crashed on sector 121 so I rebooted and now the HDD is not being recognized.

I tried using partition magic to format it, no HDD found.

 

Well there are two options, one pull the drive out, say a little prayer to your god, and then give it a viking funeral, place it in a boat light it on fire and push it off. Or
If you have an ide to laptop hd converter try plugging it into another computer to test, i bought mine on ebay for $1.00 so thats not bad.
I say newegg a new hd.

 

I will be getting a new HDD. It's almost certainly completely dead. The funeral will be great.