I built a monster computer recently which will not work worth a damn. MB: Gigabyte GA-8IHXP CPU: 2.53GHz P4 RAM: 2x RAMBUS 256M 1066MHz OCZ HD: Western Digital 120GB Special Edition CDROM: HP CD-Writer 9300 Vid Card: Leaktek A250 (Geforce 4400) Other: OEM Sound Blaster Audigy This is a long painful story but please tell me what you think. --Chapter1 the Hard drive-- After I got everything installed for the first time I booted the computer up with a Windows XP CD and started the setup. But every time it finished formatting the Hard drive (took FOREVER!) it always reported that formatting failed? After trying multiple times and using fdisk to make different partitions, I finally gave up on that and put the drive in another computer where it formatted fine and scan disk found nothing wrong? So I put the HD back in my machine. --Chapter2 the CDROM drive-- Now with a properly formatted HD I tried the setup again, this time I just choose to leave the file system without quick or full formatting. And setup continued .... until at 2% it could not find or copy files!?!? This is a brand new mint condition XP Pro CD, how could there be copy errors? I re-tried copying the files until the cows came home but it would not work. So eventually I decided I would just try skipping afew files to see if the install would continue. It was RIDICULOUS! If a blue screen didn't stop me first, I ended up skipping over half the files! At this point I decided my new XP CD must be bad so I tried a Win2k CD... same problem. So the CDROM drive must be bad, started swaping in CDROM drives from other computers and having the same problem, until I tried this Old Quad speed thing from like 1990. For some reason it was able to copy the files fine with out a single copy error!?!? Whatever I finally got XP installed, or so I thought. --Chapter3 The Haunted OS from HELL-- So I'd say I had about a 33% chance of successfully booting my OS without getting some kind of Blue screen. This is right after a clean install. As I started installing drivers and restarting I continued to notice really strange things going on. This one time it would immediately log me out every time I logged in! But afew reboots later and the problem fixed itself. Then explorer would randomly crash, dlls would not be found, files would stop copying, and ofcourse blue screens would happen randomly. In the course of an hour I went from clean install to completely hosed OS. I don't know what I did wrong, I installed a Graphics card driver, the Audigy driver, some motherboard drivers, and seached microsoft FAQs on the web. That was all it took to completely screw my computer. --Chapter4 Dumbfounded-- So I've repeated these steps a few times and I can manage to install XP but the damn thing crashes or does weird stuff for no appearent reason. Installing new drivers does not help or makes it worse. Removing the Audigy, swapping the GeForce4400 for a Geforce2, and swapping hard drives and CDROM drives all do not seem to help. Basically the OS will do okay if you don't use it. I have no clue what is wrong. I think I must be building this computer on an ancient Indian burial ground or something. If you have any idea what could be wrong PLEASE let me know. I need to decide if I'm going to send all this stuff back for refund before my 30 days runs out. Thanks for your help and sorry for making you read all that.

I personally have tried to install a fresh install of xp with a nvidia card installed and it would not install, it would go so far and hang. I took the nvidia out and put in another generic vga card and it would let me install xp then and after xp was all loaded and up I removed the generic and put the nvidia back in and the computer runs fine. I would say part of your problem is your video card. Put in another one and then load xp. I have also read some post where soundblaster caused some problems with installing xp. I would pull sound card also while attempted to setup and after xp installed put it back in. Pull cards, put in some other vga other than nvidia, fdisk, format and install again then put your cards back in one at a time and get the yellow out of device manager one at a time.

This may be redundant, but give it a thought: is your motherboard configured correctly? are your DMA's set correctly? is your computer running too hot? is the power supply sufficent?

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/using/howto/gettingstarted/guide/troubleshoot.asp Is where I'd start...I've not had experience with XP but, So What? Gotta start somewhere.

maybe its a combination of a bad motherboard/ cdrom drive. take it back immediately and get everything replaced including your copy of XP. For u to fix all of these problems you mentioned would be near impossible. take it all back and shop elsewhere. Listen to my warnings, I have had the same prob. that u have had recently, but I was'nt able to take my stuff back.

funny ? but is the xp cd an original or copy?

It might be worthwhile to try a differend cable from the motherboard to the hard drive. If you couldn't even get the drive to format, there has to be a problem there. Or the motherboard itself isn't working right.