new motherboard problems

i just bought a new ASUS prp800-vm motherboard and installed it. Once i tried to boot, it would flash a screen right after BIOS completed, and restart. On a different hardrive, i got Linux to run, ruling out a hardware problem. Now i got windows XP pro to run on that hard drive. So i think the problem is that my main hard drive with all my files on it, is setup using the Emachines recovery disk, not a clean XP install.Therefore it uses drivers for the Emachines motherboard. So i tried to hook it up as a slave to be able to transfer the files over, but the screen still came up, saying there was a hardware problem. So, i have two questions.. 1. is there any way i can get the original hard drive to work, maybe through recovery console or soemthing? and, if not.. 2. how should i go abotu tranfering my files over?

thank you for any help!

-chris