Will not boot up

Keep taking it out and re-inserting back in with it turned on (a bit dangerous, be careful.) Sooner or later you'll get a message asking you if you'd like to format your hard drive to fix the problem... accept and it'll re-format your hard-drive, you log in details would still be there but all other stuff will get erased. It worked for me, hope it works for you. Take care.

did you format the hard drive first?
typically you need to format the hard drive using the NTFS file system before you install your operating system.

does your bios recognize the hard drive?
make sure your bios detects the hard drive.

can you boot your computer in Safe Mode? If so, do that and use your error log to find the specific cause of the blue screen,

lastly post the blue screen error message on here to get a better answer.

The PXE-X61 error means that the laptop cannot detect the hard drive. This can be caused by a faulty disk controller, or a faulty disk drive.
1st. Reseat the hard drive and see if the laptop boots up.

2nd. Go into the BIOS configuration and see if the BIOS detects the hard drive.

3rd. If the BIOS can't detect the hard disk, the remove the hard drive and connect it to an USB hard drive adapter and plug it into a working computer's USB port. If this computer detects this drive as an external disk drive and you can see the contents of the hard drive, then the hard drive is OK and the fault is in the laptop.

4th. If the hard drive cannot be detected then the hard drive is faulty, you need to replace the faulty hard drive in your laptop and install Windows to get an operating laptop again.

Configuring the BIOS
After completing the drive installation, restart your computer. Your computer
may automatically detect your new drive. If your computer does not
automatically detect your new drive, follow the steps below.
1. Restart your computer. While the computer restarts, run the system
setup program (sometimes called BIOS or CMOS setup). This is usually
done by pressing a special key, such as DELETE, ESC, or F1 during
the startup process.
2. Within the system setup program, instruct the system to auto detect
your new drive.
3. Save the settings and exit the setup program.
When your computer restarts, it should recognize your new drive.
That should work ya long haired hippie. give me a shout this weekend, M.Y. (puff puff pass *****!)

Is you new hard drive lager than you old on and was the disk drive a factory replacement cause with those disks if you even change just that they will not work

try this. load defaults on bios. retry boot from xp cd. on windows setup. choose recovery console. on dos mode. choose OS (XP). Run CHKDSK /R.

Certain diags only test the diagnostic tracks. That is what's passing more than likely. You should boot the laptop in safe mode (F8) and click start, run, type in cmd, hit enter and type scandisk. This will do a complete scan on the drive. If there are any errors replace the drive.

S.M.A.R.T (system monitoring)is the warning software that detects when a hard drive is about to fail, so i would back up any important docs to a disc or usb drive immediately and replace the hard drive. The hard drive controller itself will not be the problem, it's the controller saying that the problem is the drive, the controller is only a driver and not a peice of hardware, pressing F1 will ignore any faults and continue to boot, but especially if it doesnt always boot it's definately your hard drive.