Help with xp installation

Where was the install going, C ? and on restart where does it want to go ?

What is on E partition ?

I would back up drivers (driverbackup) and your personal files, and whatever you have on the E Partition. Delete partitions, and start over. Then recreate your partitions and restore files.

Sounds like the MBR may be damaged, so try reformatting the drive in complete (slow) mode to rebuild the MBR. If that doesn’t help, make sure RAM is fully seated on the sockets, check the processor temperature touching the heatsink, and reset the processor with new thermal grease between it and the heatsink. Check the power supply connectors, the data hard drive connectors, reset the BIOS removing the button cell battery for 5 minutes. . If nothing helps, try another CD/DVD Drive. Also check the BIOS disk drive settings and if necessary enable IDE native in the Chipset menu.. and postpone installing the SATA drivers when you have installed Windows.

More likely boot.ini has a Setup entry which has not gone away, causing the loop and the mbr is not damaged.

Come to think of it, you may be right. I suppose the boot.ini file was created when the attempted installation. Only question is how could the installation program create a corrupted boot.ini after a format? Seems to me that the MBR is more likely to survive a format since it is located in the first sector of the Hard Drive, not located within the partition… besides I suppose a corrupted boot.ini would cause some message but the OP doesn’t mention any.

In any case I had this very same problem days ago, I did the first format (complete format) from Hiren's boot CD, restarted and began an installation and at the first restart it stopped at the screen with the message “Press any key to boot from CD..” So there was no way the installation could continue. So I started the installation again, formatted and the same thing happened, I started still another installation with another Windows CD doing a quick format, and that solved it. I doubt the different CD made any difference, it’s more likely to have been the different type of format… and I seriously doubt the boot.ini was created corrupted twice so I’m more inclined to believe it was the MBR...(?)

I agree. OP has multiple partitions. Boot.ini will always be in first and transfer control to the partition actually holding windows. If OP formats a partition, the boot.ini can remain in part-1 untouched, or, messed up and stay that way if it was not the first partition that was formatted.