building first pc. Gibabyte K8 triton mobo + amd64. on switching on, recognises IDE HD (maxtor 7200 200Gb), graphics card (ati radeon 9800 se) and optical (dvd-rw). tried to install windows from cd a couple of times, but got into loop, where it tried to re-install each time without taking. installed xp onto HD from another pc, which reads the HD fine. on switching on, it trys to start windows but getting blue screen (stop: 0x000007B ) boot error. i've tried a few other working xp hd's on the machine and get exactly same thing, but then these go back to working n their own PCs. I've swapped and replaced ribbon cables. i've been through bios a number of times, and believe everything is in order, but don't claim to be anything close to an expert. please help - what am i doing wrong? Thanks.

Welcome Geri K

Hmmm...usually this would point to a fried hard drive but you said that you can put this hard drive onto another PC and it works fine, right?

Welcome to PCHF Geri K

When you installed windows onto a hard drive installs motherboard drivers and places key entries into your registry for that specific motherboard.
So when you move the hard drive to another machine with a different motherboard you will more than likely get an error like you did. (this happens 99% of the time)

Could you answer some questions which might help us pinpoint the problem?

Do you get an error message when installing windows or does it just restart?

At what stage of the setup does it restart your machine? e.g after (loading network, video card e.t.c)

Was your hard drive blank (formatted) when you tried to install windows?

Also make sure that you have setup your motherboard correctly e.g. if you have placed an additional PCI Sound Card in that you have disabled the onboard in the BIOS e.t.c


***EDIT*** Could you also confirm whether your motherboard is the Gigabyte GA-K8NS

Yes it's a GA-K8NS, and yes the hd works in other pcs.

Previously, when reinstalling windows, I got no error messages. it just kept going striight back into windows setup while cd was in, even if i chose repair option. - once the cd came out i was back to boot failure again.

I did format the hard drive - again using another pc. I'm now formatting once again on the problem system. one thing to note, when using repair/format this time, the unpartitioned drive shows up as 131070 mb - a little short of the 200g's on the hd.

I don't have an additional sound card. I'm only an eager learner, but i'm pretty sure that the bios is set up ok.

does it matter that the channel 0 master is the HD and the channel 1 slave is the dvd? (no floppy). Thanks for your help so far.

Geraldine

Hope this

Thanks for the info

I would recommend connecting the DVD and the Hard drive to seperate IDE Cables.
You should have two IDE cables in your machine, so connect the Hard drive to the first cable - IDE0
and set the jumper on the DVD to master and connect it to the IDE1 cable.

Make sure everything else is disconnected so that all you have connected is basically your new Hard drive and DVD, then boot off your Windows XP CD, choose a Full install - not repair.

Delete the existing partition and then re-create it. Format the system with NTFS and start loading windows.

You can follow these instructions if you get confused.
http://www.windowsreinstall.com/winx...whdd/part1.htm

Do you have any other CD-ROM drives, it might be worth connecting another CD-ROM drive instead of your DVD drive, I have sometimes had a problem with a machine restarting during the install process, I have changed the CD-ROM drive and its worked fine. Give it a try.

I have had a look through the manual for your motherboard and it should support the 200GB drive. There is no need for a BIOS update.

Zimbo - Thanks again. I do have the IDE cables as you suggest.

Last night I managed a reformat and full install. That was however, the fourth or fifth attempt at install over the past few days, but windows is running at the minute. I'm going to let it sit for a while and install hardware/software slowly, one at a time to keep an eye on progress. Hope it was just a gremlin - can't believe it finally worked. Must check how much disk space is showing on hd.

It was nice to have a bit of support - ta. Might even build another one now!!

Geraldine