I managed to get it all to work in the end.
It was the HDD that was the problem and after I removed it the laptop could go into BIOS but there wasn't any options that helped.
After some thinking I put the XP install disk back into the laptop, removed the HDD and when the laptop POSTed and the windows disk started up to try to install windows I re-inserted the HDD and when the setup got to the screen where you choose a location for windows the HDD was found, so I chose the HDD but never formatted it again (since I already formatted it before and it was empty) and just installed XP and it works fine now.
