PC Rebooting over and over

[Xucachris]

Hi, I am building my first PC and having some issues getting it to work.
Hardware is:
Asrock 775 eSATA motherboard
Geforce7300 graphics
Celeron 2.8ghz CPU
2 x 512 ddr2 ram
Western SATA 160GB HDD taken from my other PC (has XP on it)

At first, it would get to the XP startup screen, then crash to a blue screen.

I tried again, reinstalled XP from the CD, and now it won't even get to the startup screen - it gets as first as the first black screen (is this POST?? apologies, bit new at this) that tells me how much memory I have, etc., then reboots. It will do this over and over until I turn it off.

Any ideas what to try next?
thanks

 

[drop_dc]

this may not work but my laptop wasn't even getting to the bios screen, the screen stayed blank and everything else appeared normal and after a couple seconds it would turn off and do it again, and again. I thought the mobo was screwed but, I tried taking out the battery and pressing the power button, waiting about five minutes and putting the battery back in and trying it again. This worked with my laptop, so maybe you could unplug, press power, wait five minutes, replug, press power? I just saw someone mention this about a laptop with a similar problem on another thread and couldn't believe it worked for me. It can't hurt anything so, maybe give that a try.

 

[Xucachris]

It works now...BUT!

Got it working now by reformatting the HD and reinstalling XP from the..well, the Reinstallation CD.

Major headache now - XP now tells me I have 30 days to activate OR WHAT??? Can anyone tell me what will happen if DON'T activate XP? I don't think I've done anything to annoy Microsoft - just moved the HD into a different box?
thanks

Planning is an unnatural thing: it's much more fun to do things. The nice thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise and isn't preceded by a period of worry and depression.

 

[Xucachris]

Sorted!

Called up Microsoft - they didn't seem bothered about where any of the components came from, activated my XP!

Thanks for those of you who looked in on this post

C
:haha:

 

[dannydy]

ok for your problem rite, quite easy to solve,just would be little troublesome. first what you have to do is just attached graphic card, and RAM. then turn on your PC, then when the PC asked u to insert bootable harddisk....it's mean ur above components was ok. second steps attached ur sata hard disk. reformat and install XP again. After installed, reboot.
Well, if the problem remain, i mean blue screen then,most possibility will be ur RAM.

 

[dannydy]

Sorry i didnt reliaze that u said the western sata harddisk within OS in it. First, u cant simply take one harddisk with OS from other PC attached on new PC. it'll crash and definitely cause blue screen if u didnt repair or reinstalled the window, otherwise reformat it. But i seemed u've do that.
Most of the sata harddisk will need driver to drive it and the driver contained in the M'board driver Cd. i've experienced on the m'board could be set up on Sata used for IDE mode through the BIOS. however it's depend on M'board Manufacture.