laptop problem

[biffbacon]

ok, so i have been plagued with hardware issues lately, and my old laptop just went bad. im looking for any help anyone can give. it is an old ibm thinkpad (like a 333 mhtz or something). it was working fine, and then i went to boot it up, and...
well, it shows the ibm bios page, but then just goes to a black screen with a cursor in the top left corner. i can hear the harddrive spinning down occasionally, and the cdrom spinning, but it never gets past this black screen. i tried to boot from my windows xp cd (it was running windows xp by the way), but it still just goes to the black screen, and hangs up there. after a while the cursor goes away, and its just a black screen. anyone have any ideas?

 

[Mermaidman]

CPU problem would be my guess.

 

[biffbacon]

so i let it just run for a while with the windows xp boot disk in. it started the installer, but the stopped, and gave me an error message. the message said to disconnect any new hard disks, and check any old hard disks. think its pretty safe to say it is the hard disk? the error code was 0x0000007b.

 

[jdiddy]

Run one of the hard drive tests from the program on this site http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ to be sure.

 

[biffbacon]

Originally posted by: jdiddy
Run one of the hard drive tests from the program on this site http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ to be sure.

i tried it, but it takes like 30 minutes to boot up from the cd, then the tests wont run. i run into an error.