I finished building my new PC
Gigabyte GA K8NS Pro
Athlon 64 3000+
Antec TruePower 430
CoolerMAster Praetorian Cas
Kingston Hyperex PC 2600 512MB
Reused NEC 1100A DVD+RW
Reused Maxtor 80 GB HD (Still had all files, including WinXP on it)
Reused Western Digital 30 GB HD

After going through the boot cycle about ten times I finally figured out the BIOS needs to be set to disable the GigaRaid and SerialATA Raid functionality. Still no boot to WinXP.
I reset the BIOS to boot from CD-ROM and inserted the WinXP Pro disc. Still nothing. As I write this, the floppy drive light is staring at me.
What next? Everything seemed to be going swell.

I know enuff to be dangerous.

Your floppy cable is incorrectly installed, read the first post in this forum.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

You're a pain, Crashman. One helluva smart dude who knows his stuff, but still a pain.
Anyway, thanks for the dope. I guess this might also be why the activity light is always lit on the floppy.
BTW - I reloaded WinXPPro (Yes, I do read the forums first. Occasionally.) and the system now boots. Too bad I can't install SP1. BSD half way through. I'll do a search and post for that one.
THANKS!

I know enuff to be dangerous.

heheh
Its usually something silly like that, and even experianced computer builders have bad days, and miss things like that.
It proves that its all in the details.

I also posted this to the WinXP forum. Someone's bound to have an answer. Micro$oft doesn't.

Something is causing Windows XP Pro SP1 to malfunction when I'm trying to install it. I can get every other update just fine, but SP1 stops and returns an error called "machine_check_exception" . I even formatted the hard drive and did a clean instal of Win XP Pro, then loaded the nVidia and Gigabyte drivers. Once that was loaded, I loaded the ATI Radeon 9200 drivers. I disabled the Gigabyte & SiS raid controllers from BIOS. Went to Windows Update and downloaded 52 security patches. Everything was as smooth as glass. When I tried to DL SP1, the system craps out. Any suggestions? The Windows newsgroups, Tom's Hardware, SharkyExtreme and AnandTech web sites haven't a clue what's going on.
The two harddrives, the DVD+RW, and Radeon 9200 were all transferred from my Dell XPS-T700r (with PowerLeap 1.4 GHz CPU) and had all worked flawlessly.
Interestingly enough, when I try to load Norton AntiVirus, it also return the machine_check_exception error, but the rest of Norton SystemWOrks Pro 2004 installs without a squawk.

Gigabyte GA K8NS Pro mobo
Athlon64 3000+ CPU
Kingston Hyperx 512 MB kit PC3200 (KHX3200AK2/512)
ATI Radeon 9200
Onboard RealTec audio
Onboard Marvell 10/100/1000 LAN connection/controller
Maxtor 80 GB HDD
WD 30 GB HDD
NEC floppy
CoolerMaster Praetorian Case

I know enuff to be dangerous. <P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by kep55 on 08/21/04 00:02 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

I think I may have narrowed down the problem. There's something wrong with my Western Digital drive. I tried to run AdAware, chkdsk, file cut, file copy, Ghost and they all return the machine check exception error.
So, any suggestions on how I can move about 500 files off the two logical drives so I can run fdisk & format on the WD Caviar?

I know enuff to be dangerous.

Okay, it's not the HD, although after two or three file transfers at once the MCE pops up. I got these errors from the Event Viewer. Could they be the cause?

Here are some error messages I found in the Event Viewer. They all point to the COM+ events. Could these be causing the MCE?

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: EventSystem
Event Category: (52)
Event ID: 4354
Date: 8/21/2004
Time: 8:38:20 PM
User: N/A
Computer: CAESAR
Description:
The COM+ Event System failed to fire the StartShell method on subscription {A5978620-5B3F-F1D1-8ED2-00FA0035B753}-{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}-{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}. The subscriber returned HRESULT 80004001.

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: EventSystem
Event Category: (52)
Event ID: 4356
Date: 8/21/2004
Time: 11:20:56 PM
User: N/A
Computer: CAESAR
Description:
The COM+ Event System failed to create an instance of the subscriber partition:{41E90F3E-56C1-4633-81C3-6E8BAC8BDD70}!new:{D3938AB0-5B9D-11D1-8DD2-00AA004ABD5E}. CoGetObject returned HRESULT 80070422.


Event Type: Warning
Event Source: EventSystem
Event Category: (54)
Event ID: 4353
Date: 8/21/2004
Time: 11:20:56 PM
User: N/A
Computer: CAESAR
Description:
The COM+ Event System attempted to fire the EventObjectChange::ChangedSubscription event but received a bad return code. HRESULT was 80040201.

I know enuff to be dangerous.