Almost Impossible to install windows xp

[murd3rface]

Hey guys, I was wondering if you can possibly help me out with this....

Well my genius of a cousin recently went into my computer case, screwed up everything and had to buy a whole new graphics card, motherboard, and power supply. And I also found out that my machine had an illegal copy of windows on it all along, what joy I had. Anyway my friend gave me a genuine copy of it, windows xp home edition to be exact. So the disc boots up on my computer, it formats one of my partitions, I did the NTFS method instead of quick format. It started to copy the files, and then said my computer needed to be restarted. It restarted, showed the bios screen, motherboard logo, and then....it restarted AGAIN, and keeps doing it 'till I get annoyed and just shut it off, the beeps get annoying after a while lol. So can anyone diagnose the problem here, possibly offer a solution? Any help would be greatly appreciated ^_^ Here's the specs of my computer if it helps.

Asus AM2 motherboard
2 gigs of DDR2 ram
EVGA/Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 512mb
320 gig hard drive, used to have 2 partitions, but I only formatted 1 for the windows installation.
500 watt power supply
AMD 64 Athlon 4200+
well that's about all it.

Thanks for looking

 

[kimsland]

Try removing any addon PCI card (including your Video card - if you have onboard video available and enabled in CMOS)

Also run CMOS optimized defaults
You should see a prompt on your system startup (ie Hit Del to enter setup - or some other key)

Also you may need to try Memtest on your Ram.

Confirm any ATA (IDE) Hard Drive or DVD drive is set for Cable Select (CS) jumper on back of the drive itself

 

[murd3rface]

Are you saying that any PCI device I have can interfere with the installation? What is the reason for that, well at least why lol?

 

[kimsland]

Yes I am

I am really saying, get Windows installed, then put the cards back in

Sometimes the drivers for these cards (non Windows ie Video cards) can upset the Windows installation
What I mean by that is (just in case!) Sometimes when installing Windows. Windows will try to locate the best drivers and if the addon PCI card does not accept those Windows drivers, it may fault.

Just do it, I can't explain everything I suggest

 

[captaincranky]

We might want to investigate what the beep codes are for that Mobo, it might be trying to tell you something.

 

[murd3rface]

Ah that's pretty interesting, never knew that, good old Microsoft making my life easier -_- Well, ya' learn something new everyday I suppose. I'll give that a try and let you know what progresses or not.

As for the beep codes, sorry if I didn't go into detail, it's nothing serious, just the one startup beep at the bios screen like normal. It's just annoying when it goes over and over haha.