The receptivity phenomenon, which is the process of environmental disturbances initially entering the boundary layers and generating disturbance waves, is one of the important but not well understood mechanisms involving laminar–turbulent transition of hypersonic flows. This paper presents a numerical simulation study of the receptivity to weak free-stream fast acoustic waves for a Mach 7.99 axisymmetric flow over a $7^\circ$ half-angle blunt cone. In hypersonic boundary-layer flow over a blunt cone, the process of receptivity to free-stream disturbances is altered considerably by the presence of a bow shock and an entropy layer. In the present study, both steady and unsteady flow solutions are obtained by computing the full Navier–Stokes equations with a fifth-order shock-fitting finite-difference scheme, which is able to account for the effects of bow-shock/free-stream-disturbance interaction accurately. The current numerical results for the steady base flow are compared with previous experimental and numerical results. In addition, a normal-mode linear stability analysis is used to identify the main components of boundary-layer disturbances generated by forcing free-stream fast acoustic waves. It is found that neither the first mode nor the second-mode instability waves are excited by free-stream fast acoustic waves in the early region along the cone surface, although the Mack modes can be unstable there. Instead, the second mode is excited downstream of the second-mode Branch I neutral stability point. The delay of the second-mode excitation is because the hypersonic boundary-layer receptivity is governed by a two-step resonant interaction process: (i) resonant interactions between the forcing waves and a stable boundary-layer wave mode I near the leading-edge region; and (ii) resonant interactions between the induced stable mode I and the unstable second Mack mode downstream. The same receptivity mechanism also explains the results that no first Mack mode components are generated by the current receptivity process because there is no resonant interaction between fast acoustic waves and the first Mack mode.