MBR - new system

I just put together a machine, and when I installed XP MCE, it booted normally, but after I installed the video drivers and restarted, it had a disk boot failure. It said to insert a system disk and hit enter. I put in the XP MCE CD in and hit enter, and nothing happened.

So I restarted, repaired the installation, and this time instead of installing the video drivers, I installed the on board LAN drivers from the mobo utilities disk. Even after this, no connection shows up in local connections when I try to set one up. There was a .net frameworks file, mscorwks.dll that failed to install when I repaired the Windows installation, but I don't know if that alone would completely wipe out the detection of a connection.

It is a Mach Speed socket 939 MoBo, AMD Athlon 64 3800+, 2 512MB sticks of RAM dual channel, PCI-E video card, VGA CRT monitor.

Anyone have any suggestions for these two issues?

 

What I plan to do is test the memory to see if it has a physical problem, and reformat the entire hard drive, since I used it on a prior system unsuccessfully, and still have a storage partition. I will delete everything, make a new partition, and install from scratch. Anyone have any other ideas?

 

Have you tried chkdsk /r ?
If you can get into windows, start, run type in chkdsk /r, and restart for it to check and repair any problems with the hard drive.
Although bad memory can cause problems, and is worth checking, I would still run chkdsk /r, in case.- Do I understand correctly ,from your post, that you used this drive previously ?

 

Yes, I have used it before, but I have only had it for about a month, and I didn't successfully install Windows on it because of an overheating CPU.

 

Possible a dodgy hard drive, if it failed on the other system - most hard-drive's have 2, or, 3 years warranty,If ut's a Seagate , or, Maxtor they have good tools to download on site to check them, and are brilliant in the RMA department - If it still will not install properly, I would RMA it - at least you will know then.

 

The HDD is only about a month old. On the other system, the CPU overheated while I was trying to install the OS.
I found out the board is bad.