This one has really got me baffled. I have rebuilt a computer with all new parts except the case and one CD/RW drive. I set up the boot order in BIOS to CDROM first, HDD second, and FDD third. I boot from the XP installation disk and copy files. When I get to the Starting Windows screen it just stalls. I have waited up to two hours, nothing happens. I have to shut down the computer manually. The motherboard manufacturer suggest CPU temps to high or bad memory. The CPU is an (Athlon XP+2200) instlled with AS5 and a Slim Volcano 8 cooler and runs between 46-48C. I have tried three different brands of ram (5 sticks), two sticks of Corsair VS PC2700, one stick Crucial PC2700, one Infineon PC2700, and one Infineon PC2100. All are 256MB and pass Memtest86v1.65 individually in the suspect machine with at least 20 passes each.
Here is the kicker, I have a old 30GB ATA66 hard drive with Windows 98se from another computer I upgraded. When I installed it in the new machine it recognized the drive and after reconfiguring the drivers it runs great. I flashed the BIOS to the latest version. I try to install XP from within Windows, but it still stalls at the Starting Windows screen. I try disableing all unnecessary hardware, but still no go. I have tried five different instalation disk. I have tried three different optical drives and three different hard drives. BIOS recognize everything I throw at it. There is something that Windows XP pro does not like. If anyone has had this problem or has any suggestions what I might try next I would appreciate it. Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to explain the situation. My motherboard is a Foxconn WinFast K7S741GXMG-6L with a Sparle Power Q ATX-250GU supply.

What is your new hard drive?

It is a Western Digital 80GB ATA 100 EIDE drive. WD800JBRTL I have partitioned and formated it using the data lifeguard tools CD. I have even tried to use a smaller (40GB) partition, thinking that might matter.

Found this post while searching from Google about the K7S741GXMG-6L not being able to boot windows XP from it's install CD. I'm having a similar problem - never even get to the blue setup screen. (i.e. See the message "examining your hardware..." and then get a blank screen and indefinite hang.

Suspect the problem is with Windows, NOT the hardware. Am booting with an old XP Professinal CD which has no service packs. Don't know if integrated SPs would help. Have removed all PCI/AGP cards (using integrated video), so that the only connected items are the CPU (Athlon 2100+ XP), Memory (2 DIMMS, 256 + 512 = 768Mb), A CD-RW drive (to boot with), and a Western Digital ATA-133 80 GB hard drive. Have also tried Bios failsafe settings and disablng the USB controller, sound, ACPI, etc. per the Bios.

The reason I suspect that this is not a hardware problem is because the hard drive holds a Fedora 5 (Linux) install that I did some time ago, and if I let the system boot from that HDD, the Linux distribution, X-Windows, etc. all works correctly. So the problem would appear to be the Windows XP installation process having a problem recognizing / configuring some piece of hardware.


Am going to try the usual suspects - try removing each memory DIMM in turn, but at this point, it is looking like a Windows CD with integrated SP2 might be my only hope of getting windows onto this machine.

Do a reformat with another disk, then try again.

Thanks. Decided to try reformating the hard drive prior to this post, and that did solve the problem. Now have all cards/devices plugged back in, optimized Bios settings, and the install is proceeding.

Didn't realize that Linux disk partitions could confuse the windows installer.

- Bob