hello. this is a system i built my mom and brother, also as a backup for myself Its an AMD 64 3200 on an Asus K8N-E Socket 754. here's the deal: the first step installing winxp fresh (on a seagate 200gb), it does the checkin your system hardware, bla bla, everything is ok, then the first reboot the machine does, tells you remove any discs in drive A, bla bla, reboots, start-up and repeats what it just did!! over and over and over again. the last computer i "bought", i had a lot of practice installing win on it, but i never had this problem. reading online about anything similar to it points to the hardware, which i have tested individually on my machine (remember this is my family's machine). anyway, thanks for any help or suggestions. my next step is paying someone 80$/hr to install winxp. lovely!