T61 reinstalling and blank screen

Hi guys here is the situation now. The system i have is a T61 widescreen 14.1". I have the original hard drive that is formatted with nothing on it. I put it in the hard drive bay along with a windows xp disc for installing and it powers up but the screen is blank. Nothing shows up at all on the screen.

What happened before:
Hard drive and computer given to me with the hard drive taken out. I powered it up with the battery and no hard drive it loads up to the dos screen and saids i do not have a valid boot device. Okay i was not ready to install the OS yet so i left it for a few days and finally today i decided that i was going to install it and plug it into the power to charge up the battery first. After it charged I inserted the hard drive and powered it on, upon powering up I only noticed the "_" on the top left corner I then inserted the Windows XP disc into the dvd rom drive. After that the screen goes blank and nothing after a few minutes.

I tried it without the cd and without the hard drive then without cd and with hard drive etc. It continues to power up but does not display anything at all. When it powers up the icons on the bottom of the screen lights on and then only the battery + the icon left of it continues to light up nothing else. I also tried to see if any of the 2 sticks of ram was bad, tried it many times and ram seems to be okay.

So the situation is that the computer powers up but the screen does not display anything, blank screen. If anyone could give me any help I would greatly appreciate it. Oh and the warranty is out

 

Take out the battery and hold the power button down for like 30 seconds. If that doesn't work, maybe try hooking it to an external screen.

 

Tried it with the power button for 30 seconds and hooked it to an external screen. It seems to get a signal on the screen but no displays at all just the usual text saying not connection is connected after i hook it up and power up the t61

 

enter the BIOS. There is a setting of which mode the laptop should use to talk to the HDD. Set it to compatibility mode.

your BIOS is probably talking to the HDD in SATA mode(will show as ACHI or something like that, too lazy to check it out now), and since you don't have the drivers on the HDD for that, the computer cant use the HDD at all.

then install windows. Then the drivers. Then turn that mode back to ACHI for performance.

 

Im not sure if it even enters the BIOS because the screen does not display at all.

PS. I managed to get an extended warranty for a good sum. Think this would be covered by warranty? the screen just opted out like i described in the first post