I recently installed XP on a friend's Dell. Installation goes perfectly, but when it reboots, if I have the CDROM attached, it freezes at the "Windows XP Professional" splash screen. It doesn't even show the progress bar. I've tried a known good hard drive and a known good CDROM drive and the same thing happens. Does anybody have a clue what's going on?

Not at this point. Does the hdd light show disk activity? Did the Dell originaly come with XP? Assuming without a CD drive the machine boots just fine? Skip

There is no hard drive activity once it's frozen. Yes, the machine originally came with XP. Media Center, I believe. Sometimes the machine boots fine without the drive and others it freezes at various points (Welcome Screen...).

If the drives are IDE then you probably have conflicting jumper settings. Best to use Master and Slave settings if two drives are on the same cable. That way you can connect the boot (Master) to either connector. Sometimes Dell computers don't like Master/Slave settings. In that case you must configure BOTH drives to CS (cable select). The drive on the end of the cable will be the Master in that case. Reversing the cable can cause malfunctions. The Colored end (usually blue) goes to the board. Grey and Black are for the drives.

I apologize for not stating so earlier, but the hard drive is SATA and the CDROM is IDE. I left them connected exactly as they were when I got it. I only swapped them out after this problem started. Also, don't forget that I was able to install Windows just fine.

So if the CD drive is not connected the computer will boot to WinXP and run OK? If so, go to Device Manager and see what is listed under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Are there any yellow or red exclamation marks in Device Manager?

Sometimes. Just really slowly. It gets to the welcome screen and stalls. Then, several minutes later it will say loading your settings (or whatever). Same thing with safe mode. the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers listing is as follows (with no exclamation points): Primary IDE Channel Primary IDE Channel Secondary IDE Channel Secondary IDE Channel Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller Under Other Devices I have the following (with all exclamation points): Ethernet Controller PCI Device PCI Simple Communications Controller SM Bus Controller Universal Serial Bus (USB) Controller Video Controller (VGA Compatible) Obviously, I haven't loaded those drivers yet, but I'm not sure if any of them are causing this problem.