hey there, i just bought a new motherboard (Abit VT7 2.5ghz, 1gig ram) / processor / ram and attempted to install it - upgrading from my P4 1.6ghz, 256mb ram previous setup.

setup previously was:
60gb hd (master)
30gb hd (slave, formatted)
52x CD drive (master)
52x/24x CDRW drive (slave)
3.5 floppy
ATI Radeon 7500 AGP (64mb) video card
SB pro audio sound card

immediately i ran into some problems that i was hoping someone here could help with so that i dont have to go pay 100 bucks to get a "professional" to fix it lol.

first, when hooking up everything to the MB exactly as it was previously on the old one, it would boot from the primary HD to a point, would try to load agp440.sys (as seen in safe mode cmd line), and give blue screen of death.

thought i, well i will just take that HD out, set the other to master, change the appropriate cables and slap in my XP cd to reinstall on the newly formatted backup drive. i set up bios to try to boot from CD, then floppy, then HDs - however it didnt boot from any CD i put in it, 95, 98, XP, or XP recovery. it would instead try to boot from the HD and fail. i then put in an old dos 6.22 boot floppy just to see if that would work, and lo and behold it did - it wouldnt see a CD but it would boot from (and installed!) dos 6.22.

now, i can boot up from floppy or HD1 but it will not boot from CD, also - when i get to dos prompt it does not see ANY cd drive, or the second HD. they are cabled in propperly and have power, and in bios it sees them but its not working at all.

any help appreciated, if you need more details just ask.

I have the same problem

I had a MB (not sure the Brand) every time I put a new divice on it the boot pattern changed in the bios. I would not take it for granted that your settings are staying the same, try swapping the 30 gb for the slave cd
on boot go to setup and make the first boot cd.
if that works and you can get to the startup microsoft website has instructions to disable agp440.