My computer restarts at the XP loading screen

[dturner0528]

I am building a new desktop computer, and I got it all put together last night. It beeps once, which I'm assuming means it passed the bios, flashes the MOBO screen, and then goes to the black XP loading screen. It restarts here, only to do it all again.

I'm building it based off my old computer; all new parts except my 2 HDDS and ATI Radeon HD 5770 GPU.
I have XP Home 32bit on one of the HDDs, and I'd rather not do a complete format of this drive if I don't have to; I may have some files and documents on it, I'm not sure. The motherboard on my old computer fried, so I can't check what all I have on the drive. I do have access to a copy of Windows 7 if I have to do a clean sweep, however.
(Ha, I may just have to sneak into work early one morning and plug the main HDD into my work PC to check any files)

I have tried unplugging everything unnecessary for the compy to run; DVD drive, extra hdd, mouse, keyboard, all case fans (I had to leave the GPU plugged in because the motherboard has no onset graphics)
I’ve heard that a single beep could mean the RAM is bad, but I’ve tried seating both DIMMS in all 4 slots (singly) and the BIOS reads them every time. I have noticed that they are only coming up as DDR3 1333. Could this be it?

New:
AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Deneb 3.4GHz
ASRock 970 EXTREME3 AM3+ AMD 970
HAF 912 Tower Case
Antec NEO ECO 520C 520W
2 x AMD Entertainment Edition 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (8gb total)

Old:
150 GB Maxtor HDD (the OS is on this drive)
1.5 TB Western Digital HDD (files and documents on this drive)
ATI Radeon HD 5770 Discreet Graphics Card

sorry if this post is in the wrong catagory; from the google searches i made, this seemed to be the most accurate one. I found many sites saying that the Ram or mobo has gone bad, and a few that said that reinstalling the OS would fix it, because the currect OS didn't have the proper drivers to read the CPU

 

[alexoiu]

Hi, If set to AHCI, try switching SATA to IDE in BIOS. The XP might not have the SATA driver installed.

 

[chugot9218]

Your copy of XP may be tied to the previous MOBO and thus will not operate on the new one without a re-install.

 

[hwangchan]

If the HDD & OS is from the previous system, the driver files the OS installed will not work with your new hardware. As Chugot pointed out, the HDD is "tied" to the mobo from the OS install, at least the model of mobo, not the specific serial unit.

If you want to preserve the data, load an os on another hardrive (such as your 1.5 Terra, you would only lose the data if it is necessary to reformat) or liveboot from CD an OS (such as ubuntu, or a windows boot cd) to recover the files and save to another media, such as USB or the storage drive, then reinstall the OS on the original drive.

Not sure if it would work, but you could also try the repair option when you put in your OS disk so the proper drivers might get loaded, but this likely would be blocked for DRM reasons.

 

[dturner0528]

Best answer selected by dturner0528.

 

[dturner0528]

If the HDD & OS is from the previous system, the driver files the OS installed will not work with your new hardware. As Chugot pointed out, the HDD is "tied" to the mobo from the OS install, at least the model of mobo, not the specific serial unit.

If you want to preserve the data, load an os on another hardrive (such as your 1.5 Terra, you would only lose the data if it is necessary to reformat) or liveboot from CD an OS (such as ubuntu, or a windows boot cd) to recover the files and save to another media, such as USB or the storage drive, then reinstall the OS on the original drive.

Not sure if it would work, but you could also try the repair option when you put in your OS disk so the proper drivers might get loaded, but this likely would be blocked for DRM reasons.

I Googled live booting Linux and got a CD of puppy Linux made and that did it! I was able to check my hard drive before performing a clean install of windows 7 over it. Its a good thing I checked, I had some wedding pictures that I was able to move off with a jump drive. Haha. I never knew live booting existed, thank you for telling me.