A problem I've never seen before.

I recently help a friend put together a new system and it won't fully boot. All components are recognized correctly. I've gone into the BIOS and adjusted every setting I can think of nothing works. When I try to boot from the Windows XP CD, it will begin the setup, but then go directly to starting windows w/o asking me if I want to do a repair install, etc... Also, I tried hitting F6 to install third party RAID/SCSI drivers and it froze.


Components:


Intel C2D E6400
GSkill 2x1GB 533mhz DDR2
120 GB PATA Seagate HDD
ECS NFORCE 570 SLIT-A (V5.1)

Has anyone experienced this or have some ideas that could potentially solve this problem?

While that is a quite helpful link, it won't work for the machine in question. When the windows cd is in the drive and booted from, it never makes it to the Recovery Console. It sets up the hardware profiles and then goes immediately to starting Windows.

Thanks anyways.

so are you installing to a drive which already had windows on it or is it a brand new drive? Maybe try fdisking that sucka and starting from fresh??

well there's the problem, I didn't know you took HDD out of another system and trtied to reinstall it in a new system with different hardware........oops.
That wont work, you'll have to transfer the the O/S from the old drive to a new one that is already installed.........it's not recommended you try this, even if it does work you'll have to update all the drivers and reinstall all programs.
Whenever a Windows O/S is loaded onto a HDD the O/s takes a virtual snapshot of the hardware that is configured when it was originally installed, now that you have (tried) transferring that loaded HDD to another system the O/S took another snapshot of the new configuration, compared the 2 systems and said "there's somrething wrong with this picture".........

Well, when I installed a new processor in my pc, I had to do a repair install to get it to correctly recognize the new processor(amd 3200+ to a AMDX2 4600+). I knew that Windows didn't like too many hardware changes too quickly (especially OEM versions). But I figured I could boot from the WinXP CD and just reinstall the files and be able to maintain everything else. But as previously stated, it doesn't work and reboots everytime before even getting the WinXP splash screen.

Yeah, another friend of mine mentioned that it might be bad. I'm going to bring my copy over there today and see if I can get it to load off of it. If so, then we'll have to get a new copy of WinXP for him.


Thanks again guys, keep the ideas coming.

I would say it's the CD too. If you have it set to boot to the CDROM with a bootable CD then the install should start. If it errors then it will try other bootable devices (which is why the hard drive with Windows is booting).

Perhaps it wouldn't let you create a another partition because there was no more room on the drive for another partition. The 120 GB space is probably one partition taken up by the old installation of XP. It's best to delete that partition and create a new one since you are installing onto new hardware (you can do this within the setup of Windows).