Boot Problem

I've had a hard drive failure so i purchased and installed a new hard drive (Maxtor 60GB 7200RPM) and installed XP Pro. Now most (not all) of the time I start the puter it gets to the point where it says it detects the drives then when it should load windows it restarts. Then I get the screen that tells me windows didn't load start in safe mode ect I tell it to start normal and it does the same thing. Once it goes thru and windows loads everything works fine.
It is detecting the drives properly so I can't figure out why it seeems to have a problem loading windows.

the system is:
AMD Athlon 1.4 Gig
PcChips mobo M810LMR
1 Gig RAM
XP PRO (upgraded to SP)

 

Sounds like a faulty OS installation or a problematic device driver, heck may be a missing one.
Have you installed your motherboard drivers?
What type of drive is it, is it IDE or Serial-ATA?
What service pack do you have installed? Did the problem start occuring from the first day or did it start later on? Please give a bit more info if you have installed all the drivers, etc.

 

the OS was installed clean on a brand new hard drive (formatted to NTFS)
i have not run the disc that came w/ the mobo,didn't think I needed to as it was all working before. the drive is an IDE

 

oh and the OS was an OEM disc of XP Pro SP1 which after I installed it I ran all the updated from Windows update including SP2 so it is now SP2 and has all current updates

 

Oh, I just noticed your mobo PCChips...bad, really bad brand, it could possibly be even the mobo, but as it stands IMO the main suspect is RAM, try a FDISK/mbr on the HardDrive to see if it helps.
Other possibilities are bad IDE port or ribbon cable.
I am not sure how tech savvy you are and how you installed the new drive, if you just installed it once, again it could have been an installation problem, doesn't matter if the drive/XP CD was good or new. However, many Windows installation problems were linked to bad media, media player(CD-ROM drive) and even so to RAM.
Is this a generic RAM, if so anything is possible, if it is 2 sticks of 512MB RAM, try one at a time to see if it yields any success....this is it for now.