I have bought two identical computers. The MB - MA78GM-US2H from gigabyte. The processor - Athlon 64 x2 7750 (new architecture one). 4 gigs of gskill ram, an SATA seagate hard drive, SATA Lite-on dvd burner, earthwatt power supply by rosewill 530w, and rosewill case. Every time I try i boot up (even after updating both motherboards, I have two of the exact same type, by flashing bios) it hangs up on loading dmi pool data. Then I got the smart idea, I'll try installing on a blank old IDE drive. So I put it in, and it loads past "loading dmi pool data" then I get a blue screen when it says, "beginning to install windows" after you put the windows xp cd in and it loads all the basic drivers. It does this every time. Occassionally I can get the SATA drives this far as well. I've tried swapping out every piece of hardware (identical hardware) and nothing, both motherboards, hard drives, cd roms, power supplies... it does the exact same thing. Please help, I need to put together a bunch more of these. Thanks.

does it matter that the windows xp cd is only SP1? does that not work with SATA?

You need to either use an IDE compatibility mode in the BIOS or provide SATA controller drivers when prompted at the beginning of the installation. I recommend you slipstream SP3, the SATA drivers, and If you are going to do a number of the same exact build, also add any drivers that would normally get installed after WinXP is up. Are you installing using a volume license CD? Use nLite to slipstream everything I mentioned.