W98SE to XP Pro. Upgrade Problem.

Hello,
The computer has a MS-6309 mobo. a P3 866mhz. proc. 256 mb.RAM 27gb. free space on the hard disk. I am trying to upgrade from W98SE to XP Pro. Things seem to proceed normally as follows Collecting information and Dynamic udate go OK ,it then goes to the preparing installation mode analyzing your computer and copying installation files which runs for about 20 minutes it then says restarting your computer, it does this, then the Starting Windows setup bar appears it runs across OK once then the screen goes to a darker blue setup screen and Preparing Installation starts with no time to complete displayed but it has a progress bar, this takes about 14 minutes of churning away to complete, as soon as it completes the machine reboots with no warning , its starts, gets to the Windows XP pro. screen the little blue squares get about halfway across the bar and the computer reboots ,and then continues to so probably for ever , it does display a screen with the option to uninstall and it does uninstall OK. I have attempted the install a number of times with the same result. Any suggestions would be appreciated .
Thanks John Ely Australia

 

It is easier to do a "Clean" install of XP, then a upgrade of it.

 

Copy the l386 folder from the install cd to a folder on your hard disk. Then try running setup from there.

 

It really is not a good idea to do an upgrade install and quite honestly, I have yet to hear of one that has been done successfully and/or has not had problems arise down the road. You would be better off backing up anything you don't want to lose, formatting and installing XP on a nice clean hd.

 

Thanks for the replies, I think I will follow your advice and do a full install, the main reason I did not want to go that way was the difficulty of finding XP drivers for for some of the hardware such as the onboard sound and the old video card. Thanks again .
Regards.