IBM A31 2652 Video garbled video at boot

I believe this is happening cause the ram memory is either damaged or not well inserted in slots.. Open the ram memory compartment and remove them all and insert them back one by one and try to boot up with which one at the time .. This way you will see if any of them is damaged cause will do the same or will not boot at all ..
let me know what you've managed to do ..and how it behaved after checking the ram memory ..

connect an external monitor and check how is the display,if the display is fine on external monitor,then it would be your
LCD OR VIDEO CONNECTION OR CABLE NEED TO CHECK .
If you are getting the garbled picture on the external monitor also it could be

SHARED MEMORY AT FAULT( If the laptop uses shared video memory (part of the main memory is used for the video purposes), it's possible that you have a faulty RAM stick.)

OR

VIDEO CARD (if the video card is discrete replace take out that and check the video with integrated video card and if the video card is integrated then you have to replace the mother board)

Well, first of all XP is not the latest supported operating system from Microsoft.

That being said, I have not had a garbled screen followed by an error message 'setup didn't find any hard disk drive installed' on a laptop, in my limited experience with laptops (i.e. Acer One, Acer Aspire, Sony Vaio, etc.)

If you have an unexpected garbled screen it points to the pc board or mother board or the video card, but more likely the motherboard.

And, if you couple this with the hard disk drive not being detected, it reminds me of a situation where I had a no hard disk drive detected on a SCSI drive connected to my Windows 95 computer in the 1990s when I had heat related issues with the circuitry on the hard drive getting burnt out capacitors.

If the drive is not recognized, it might mean the boot sector is wiped, and essentially it needs to be reformatted and the operating system needs to be reinstalled (which you evidently tried to do).

To my memory, I never had this problem on Windows XP with a laptop, so I am thinking it's not Windows that is at fault, but the physical hardware is giving you problems.

If you boot from the CD for Windows XP and it doesn't find the drive, it's a big problem for this laptop.

I wish you luck in finding an answer to that one, seeing that it's out of warranty and XP is no longer supported by Microsoft.com.

have you tried a new video card? i do not believe that you can flash video bios

It appears that your inverter may be failing, especially if there is a garbled picture and red tint upon initial boot. Buy a new or used inverter on ebay and swap it out yourself.

The symptoms you are describing are a failure of the VRAM of the video card. To resolve will require replacement of the video Card:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Dell-D800-M60-8500-FX5200-Graphics-Video-Card-M6688_W0QQitemZ330394777550QQcmdZViewItemQQptZPCC_Video_TV_Cards?hash=item4ced1037ce#ht_536wt_1166

update monitor driver
your screen may be going
how old is the system

Connect an external monitor to the laptop, power up the monitor first and then bootup the laptop. The Windows image will automatically divert to the external monitor.
If the images is OK then the video card is OK.
From the description of the fault, it indicates that the fault could be a faulty video cable or video connector. Try reseating the video cable/connector on the motherboard.
Get back to me if you still have problems together with any error messages etc.

it is most likely the display chip on the motherboard

If you are getting garbage on the screen before windows tries to load the laptop probably has a bad motherboard.

It's possibly only the video output is going bad on it, try hooking it to an external monitor and see if you get the same weird stuff on that screen.

Good luck, let me know how it goes