I had this grand idea of helping my son learn computers. So we took an old laptop from eBay that was for parts or repair and have started working on it. We took it apart and have seen that it has a hard drive and all the necessary pieces to run. The hard drive has been erased however and there is nothing but a short repeating messages that runs when we turn on the computer. I can get it into Safe Mode(I think that is what it is called) but when I tried run my windows xp setup cd nothing happened. The cd light on the computer comes on but nothing shows up on the screen but that same one line gibberish that is there even when the cd isn't running. Could it be the CD, the CD Rom, or something with the motherboard or all of the above. My son and I are so new to this I'm not even sure I'm asking the right question.

Have you changed the Boot Order in BIOS to allow it to boot from the optical (CD) drive ?