[littleyellow]

So I recently purchased an XFX Geforce8200 mobo with an AMD Phenom 9500 and 2x2gb dual channel RAM as a complete upgrade to my old 2600+ system. While putting it all together, I have hit a brick wall when it comes to getting my HDD to work with the new parts. I know that I need to either repair my XP or format it altogether to get everything to run right but I cannot for the life of me get that to happen.

I cleaned all the files off of my secondary HDD in that comp for the purpose of using that as a clean install but no matter how I try to get it to get formatted or get the system to boot, it leaves me with nothing.

The walls that I run into are either:
1) a blinking cursor on boot (booting from and old Dell XP Home CD)
2) "INF file txtstatus.inf file corrupt or missing, status 40% setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit" (booting from XP Pro upgrade)
3) missing or corrupt hal.dll when trying to use any other boot disk or cd (even when I choose "boot from CD " and have my bios boot from it first.

I have also tried to run windows repair but the setup always locks up as soon as i click the "install windows" button on the autorun screen

I have officially run out of ideas that won't cause permanent damage to the walls of my house......

Thank you all in advance.

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1) The Dell CDs are usually tied to only work on Dell machines.
2) Either reason 1, defective memory or a defective CD unit/disk.
3) This may be a issue with your hard drive.

[Neil Jones]

1) The Dell CDs are usually tied to only work on Dell machines.
2) Either reason 1, defective memory or a defective CD unit/disk.
3) This may be a issue with your hard drive.

[littleyellow]

1) Kinda what I thought.
2) Not a Dell CD, used known good memory and disc has worked recently but I suppose it could be the case
3) After more research I believe this error to only mean that the hard drive still has ghosts of Windows and tries to boot from it

New: Tried to use the Ultimate Boot CD, still will not boot the computer, even tried with memory I know is good.

[Troy]

If you disconnect the hard drive altogether does it boot up with a bootable disc?