[cavinman]

I have a custom built computer

I have a 120 GB sata hard drive
I have a Terebyte sata hard drive that I will use for just storage
I have a DVD Light scribe Sata
I have a blu-ray rom Sata
I have gb of DDR400 ram
Pentuim 4 3.0 ghz

I have built many computers and this one has stumped me. I have windows XP Professional I am trying to load. I can see all of the drives and the hard drive shows up and the memory counts correctly. I boot from the CD and it loads the files and then right before it should go to the format screen it reboots. If I don't boot from the cd it takes me to the Safe Mode , safe mode with networking or start windows normally. When I do that it just shuts down and reboots.
I really need some guidance. I even took the hard drive and put it in one of my other computers and installed windows xp on it and it still won't get past that start windows normally reboot problem. I even tried to install it on the terabyte and it did the same thing. Loading the drivers at the bottom and then gets to the fat NTFS File and reboots. If I try to start in safe mode it shows about 17 or so lines of commands like if you were to do it safe mode with networking and then it shuts down and reboots. Help if you can. I am about done

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If your Windows XP Pro CD is not a SP2 CD then it does not have the AHCI drivers necessary to install on a sata drive computer. Please read the solutions on this website to figure out what you need to do. I personally would burn a new CD with slipstreamed Intel matrix Storage Manager software or what ever drivers needed by the motherboard manufacturer for windows to see the SATA drives.

http://www.mydigital...e-on-ahci-mode/

SRX660

[SRX660]

If your Windows XP Pro CD is not a SP2 CD then it does not have the AHCI drivers necessary to install on a sata drive computer. Please read the solutions on this website to figure out what you need to do. I personally would burn a new CD with slipstreamed Intel matrix Storage Manager software or what ever drivers needed by the motherboard manufacturer for windows to see the SATA drives.

http://www.mydigital...e-on-ahci-mode/

SRX660

[The Skeptic]

If the operating system was installed on another computer try to install the 120 gig disk, with the operating system, and run a repair installation of XP on the new computer. Since XP was installed on another computer it cannot run on the new computer without adapting it to the new computer first. This can be done with XP repair installation.

I don't know what the source of the problem is. I am not even sure I understood the symptoms. If during installation you passed the part where you have three options (press Enter for new installation, R for recovery console etc.), created a new partition and failed at the Format stage, then I don't think it's a Sata driver problem. Had it been a Sata driver missing you would get an error message telling you that windows could not find a disk right after you pressed Enter for new installation.

I don't want to speculate any further at this stage. I might be wrong and srx660 is right. Let us know what happens and we'll see how to continue.

[cavinman]

It does recognize them in the BIOS. I can see them when it boots up and the boot Priority shows them. It is just when the windows setup starts it loads some drivers first and I never get to the format part. As soon as it says at the bottom
that windows is installing FAT or NTFS Windows NT the computer shuts down and restarts. I did install it on another computer on the 120GB but when it boots it goes to the SAFE MODE, SAFE MODE WITH COMMAND PROMPT or START WINDOWS NORMALLY. As soon as I hit any of those options it restarts. It is driving me mad. I spent about 700.00 on this thing. I have built a lot of them but this is crazy. Any more solutions like jumper settings or compatability. I have a sata card in one of the PCI slots but both the DVD-R and the 120GB are connected straight to the board. It just acts like something is not right on installation.

[The Skeptic]

So, according to what you say, the computer fails at the Setup stage, when you have driver loading shown at the bottom?

Remove the Sata card. Remove every piece of hardware which is not essential. Try the installation.

If that doesn't work, try the repair of XP as per in instructions in the link below. We need to do that to further diagnose the problem.

If that doesn't work I would try to install another operating system like Puppy Linux, which loads to the RAM only and I would try several functions which necessitate writing to the hard disk. It could be a hardware failure which I would like to test.

Download Puppy Linux from my list of links below. Download "puppy 2.16.1 seamonkey fulldrivers.ISO". Burn the ISO file to create a bootable CD. For this purpose you can download BurnCDCC from the links below. It's a very simple tool, used exclusively to burn ISO files.

Insert the disk into the CD/DVD drive and boot the computer. Use the default setting except for choosing screen resolution of 600x800 when given the option to do so. After the program is loaded click the icon that looks like flash disk. This will open the file system and will enable browsing your folders. Find the folders that you want to backup, copy and paste them to another storage device.

If the computer doesn't boot, please set boot order in the BIOS so that the CD drive is first priority boot device. don't get into any of the exotic