XP Home won't load - help!

I'm rebuilding a computer for a friend who unfortunately wants to load her license of XP Home on the rebuilt. I had to replace her motherboard with an ASRock K7S41GX (which has onboard video but she wants to re-use her NVidia card) with one gig of RAM and a brand new Maxtor 160gig harddrive. No matter what I do, I can't get the blasted XP Home to load. I've gotten so far as to get the drive formatted (once out of several tries) but then it stalls at copying files, 15% done. Most of the time, the load stalls at 'Starting windows'... nothing happens.

I've tried both IDE CD/ROMs and also tried loading it from floppies. Since I did buy her two (same) hard drives, I've even switched the stupid hard drives and it still stalls.

Any ideas?

 

I'm not a hardware expert, but my best guess- ram. Maybe try it with a different stick?

I've also seen a video card issue do something similar once or twice, but you'd be more likely to get errors than hangs.

Other things:
When windows says "press F6 to load yada yada", press F5, and choose "standard PC" when prompted, and try again.

Disable BIOS level antivirus, and any fancy BIOS memory options (caching, etc.).

Try to copy the I386 folder from the CD to the Hard Drive of another computer, to make sure the disk is readable.

Like I said, I'm not a hardware man (and it might be a good idea posting this in the hardware forum, btw), but these are my best guesses.

Good luck!

 

After I posted, I realized that the card might be a problem with the onboard video (I've never used this kind of board before and having to set the multiplier AND the FSB by jumper reminded me why I like jumperless boards).

And THAT I'd never heard of. Between the two of those, it's now loading. I'm not positive it'll continue loading, but it looks a hell of a lot better than it did!

I'm a hardware geek myself, and I loathe MicroSnot, but I'm kind of trapped by my clients' needs. THANK YOU for the hints!

 

If all goes well, excellent. If you still have issues, keep us informed. If everything is going great, keeps us informed on what you did to make things going great.

The F6 issue is typically with some older models of motherboards (unless their bios has been upgraded and a few "tweaks" in the bios) having issues with sata (also with SCSI (but most pc users rarely touch SCSI)).

 

I do believe the problem was with the mobo, now. Once I finally managed to load the OS, I went through and loaded the chipset drivers from the disk and one of them was a FSB driver which allowed use of the AGP slot. *headdesk* This was NOT discussed in the manual for the board, but in retrospect, I should have guessed, seeings that I had to set both the multiplier and the FSB speed by jumper.

Gah. Gimme a jumperless micro-BTX, please!!