My compaq presario x-1000 hard drive light and dvd rom light flashes. Won't boot up.

Course you can, is a portable hard drive not an option, or a flash drive?

Step 1. Insert the XPsoftware disc. Step 2. Restart your Computer. Step 3. Press F9 when your computer is boot up. Step 4. Change the Boot menu Hard Disc to CD/DVD ROM. Step 5. Press F10 after your change your boot menu. Step 6. Your computer will start to install your XP Software... Thanks Hope successful.....

Check the jumper settings in the back of the drive, by the power cable. Make sure your cd/dvd drive is set to SLAVE, with your primary harddrive as MASTER. Check BIOS settings, specifically your boot order, choose which drive you want to load first (usually HD 0), save and exit.
That's just the basics, though.
Another possibility is that you might just have a paperweight ;)
If so, try another drive.
Hope that helps
Cheers from NZ

If you mean "how do you boot from DVD rom" then enter BIOS and set boot device to DVD rom on all counts. That will disable the hard drive.

Does the laptop BIOS "see" the new drive? If not the drive must be "Initialised" first, otherwise it will not recognise you have a drive in the bay. Place the drive in a USB caddy and using another laptop or your laptop with the old hard drive in it, select Control Panel and Adminastrative Tools. Select Computer Management, From the side panel select Disk Management to view selected drives. The disk drive that is connected via USB will be there. Click the drive and select initialise then format and select a drive letter. OR
With the new drive in the laptop bay, set the BIOS menu, on your laptop, to use DVD/CD ROM drive as first boot device.
Place your System disk in the drive and boot from the disk.
Follow the instructions, (if any) on the screen and let the new system software initialise and format the new drive.
Hope that helps

Hi Tony,
Thanks for the details you have mentioned. The steps you have taken are correct and if the System/ hardware is ok, it should boot from CD Drive. Whenever i have faced such an issue, i always started afresh to check each hardware (CD, DVD, ROM, Hard Disk, Cables, Connections etc) and most of the times the issue was optical drive or CD/DVDs.

So, I recommend that make sure that the CD/DVD ROM is functioning properly. When the system is set to boot from CD/DVD, it must try to read CD/DVD after power on. It is indicated by spinning of the optical drive and blinking CD ROM LED. If there is a bootable CD in the drive, it should boot. You may try to boot the system through DOS bootable CD. Also, if you still have the OS on your system, you may check the CD ROM through windows.

Let me know if any further clarification/ assistance is required.

GoodLuck!
Dont forget to appreciate the solution if I could have been of any help!
CreativeTECH

The clicking noise from the hard disk indicats that you have a intermitten faulty disk and therefore the computer sometimes boots up. If you manage to get the computer to boot, I would advise you to backup or copy your data. If you can't get the computer to boot up then the hard drive is dead.
You do not need to buy a new computer, just buy a new hard drive, replace the faulty drive and install your Windows operating system, all your device drivers (eg. audio, video, LAN etc.) and all your programs. You or a friend have a few hours of work.

use this tool to reset the cd in the registry
after you run the file - reboot the computer -

http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/XP_CD-DVD-Fix.zip

turn on your computer and do nothing,, when it seems the computer stop running key in fn+f4.

Your drive or perhaps the cable is faulty and is not giving the "OK" signal to the laptop allowing it to boot... You will need to replace the faulty part.