I have got a system that was running xp on a sata hard drive which was cloned onto a second sata hard drive. The main hard drive started freezing on the welcome screen and so I started using the second hard drive but the same has happened to that. I could not boot in safe mode or last known good configuration etc. I decided to format the first hard drive and put xp back on it but every time I try to do so after it has been formatted and the xp files have been loaded onto the drive when it comes to reboot in order to load the files the computer will not load the files and just starts the whole process again of setting up windows and then giving me the option of formatting etc I am just going round in circles. Is there something special that needs to be done with a sata hard drive in order to put xp on it? Does anybody have any idea what the initial problem was with freezing screens?

Some specs on your system would certainly help us to determine what you need to do. And yes, you do need to do things differently when installing WinXP. WinXP was developed prior to the advent of SATA hard drives so there is no native support built into the original or first SPs. List the specs and the service pack that is integrated into your WinXP CD.

The service pack is sp1

The operating system contains sp1. The computer has 2gb memory,intel core 2 duo cpu@2.2ghz The manufacturer is Packard bell ,the motherboard is ga-t671mg I have no floppy drive installed

Look in the BIOS screens (setup) for a hard drive setting called AHCI and set your SATA drive to use that.