ok. What brand motherboard do you have? And is the memory new hard drive new? Hate to ask this but is the XP cd scracthed up? Take a soft cloth to it maybe it is somthing on it? And do you have an extra dvd/cd rom you can plug into another IDE cable?

Okay everything is new. xp cd i chose the one that is the lest scratched (not scratched at all) i have a dvd rom x8 plugged in a dvd-burner 16x8x16 plugged in and a floppy disk plugged in.

The mobo is an al-8 from a-bit. http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/...es=1&model=281
The only things on this comp that are not brand new are the floppy drivce and the dvd-rom x8.

So basically here is my current situation.. Win 98 installed can't run in normal mode because of processor being above 2.2 ghz, have 1 of the 2 1 gig sticks plugged in because win 98 doesn't like to much memory. When i try and install win xp it loads all the files get to "setup is starting windows" goes one screen beyond that and freezes (sometimes it restarts). Both partision i have made are formatted (by using fdisk). As a side note when i install windows xp it doesn't detect that win 98 is installed. I am going to download the trial of win xp pro x64 and try and install that see how it goes.

The computer is
intel 630 3.0 ghz 800 mb fsb EM64 enabled HT enabled
2 gigs of ddr2 ram (pc 4200 / 533 mhz) dual channal enabled (only one stick is in now)
dvd rom x8
dvd-burner 16x8x16
floppy drive
250 gig sata drive (250 gig manufacturers terms, about 203 gigs microsofts terms i think), split up into 2 partision each one turns out to be about 98 gigs
Ati radeon x800 with 256mb of gddr3 memory PCI express

That is all the information i beleive that i have for you, ask any more questions if you think i have missed something and if it will help please. Oh ya and the screen turning off but the rest staying on stopped now it is just straight up freezing or retarting.

can you take the IDE cable out of the slave dvd rom and just have the dvd burner plugged in and if that dont work just plug in the dvd rom, thinking mybe you got a bad rom drive, worth a shot.

already done that i started with just the dvd-burner in but i put the dvd-rom in because my friend had said he knew someone who couldn't install windows with a dvd-burner.

ok lets try this download this and save it to a floppy and run it see if that hard drive has a corrupt boot sector.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Did you check and make sure you dont have the floppy wire installed to the hard drive :-D

But dont think you can since you are running SATA drives you should have little thing red cables! Going into the motherboard

it is fixed i reseat all teh drives, bought new copy of windows, and wiped the hard drives.

Good job?