What I find many times is the OS was moved from some other machine. This rarely works. We get to do a repair install and follow the sata XP install procedure and hope that cures it. If not we wipe the drive and start fresh.
Bob
I am having a problem starting XP on my system. I have 3 hdd's; one SATA and two IDE drives. The problem I am having is that Windows XP won't boot up. After the black screen containing the Windows XP logo at startup, the screen goes blank and the system freezes at that point.
My configuration is as follows:
Intel P4D; Intel D945 PWM;
1 - Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 320GB SATA Drive --> this is my main OS drive {connected to SATA 0}
2 - 300 GB maxtor IDE drive {connected to SATA 1 via IDE-SATA adapter}
3 - 200 GB Maxtor IDE drive {connected to SATA 2 via IDE-SATA adapter}
I have a SATA adapter on the 2 IDE drives, hence their connection to the SATA ports on the mobo. I have 2 DVD drives on the IDE cable.
I have ensured that with the SATA adapter on the IDE drives, the jumper settings on the IDE drives are all set to master. Prior settings of the jumpers to "slave" would result in no boot screen at all upon powering on. That mistake recognized and rectified, I still cannot figure out why XP won't load under my current setting.
The BIOS settings have been set so that SATA 0 is the drive to boot from (the true SATA drive). In the BIOS, the system is recognizing the other HDD's connected to SATA 1 and 2 without a problem.
SATA 1 has my old image on it (also with XP), and when I set SATA 1 as the drive to boot from, I get the same problem of Windows freezing at the black "Windows XP logo" start up screen.
Being pretty new at building systems in my spare time, I can't figure out the problem. Any suggestions? I feel as if I'm overlooking something pretty simple, but all the mobo drivers and the like are all up to date.
Thanks.

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