XP wont load

[lelwyr]

I have an k7vzm elitegroup motherboard, amd duron 1.0Ghz, and 384 mb of ram. I am using a maxtor hard drive. Now i have had windows xp professional running on this computer previously i had wanted to see what windows media center edition was like and that worked fine except that the computer got an amazing amount of viruses and spyware and the like. Now i have formatted it to reinstall just plain old windows xp but the setup will not load. I installed onto the harddrive in question using another computer just to see if it was the hard drive or my xp cd but it worked fine. I also tried just putting that installed xp hard drive into the computer and it will not load xp. I then tried it on another hard drive but it does exactly the same thing. Windows just refuses to load. Any suggestions would be wonderful. Thank you so much.
L

[Doc Timbo]

if you install XP on a hard-drive on a motherboard...and then put the drive into another motherboard...XP wont load. you need a blank partition to install XP onto while on the motherboard it will run on.
Also.. to load XP from CD needs a compatible mobo and also a compatible CD/DVD rom. Do u have both of these? Can u get into the BIOS on your motherboard? set it to boot from CD first if so.

[lelwyr]

Eveything except maybe the cd-rom is compatible(i may or may not have put one of my newer cd-roms into it at the time i cannot remember). As i said in my previous post i have had xp running on this computer before. I have had this problem before too but damned if i remember how i fixed it.

[Doc Timbo]

you say 'XP wont load' but that could be many many things... like...the CD drawer motor is broken. U need to explain the actual things that happen, not your understanding of them. Then I'm sure someone will be able to help :)

[lelwyr]

The blue screen set up loads to the point where it says that windows is starting. With windows on the hard drive having been installed on another computer (i know this causes problems but occasionally helps to find what the problem is) It gets past all the pre windows booting and where it should get to the screen saying that windows is loading please wait it just remains black.

[Doc Timbo]

i kinda had the same thing once when i tried to use norton ghost.... the partition i ghosted to at first wasnt the active partition and it failed outright... after setting it as active it just sat at the black screen with the XP logo and the loading bar going across on the bottom.

Not sure that is any help to anyone with better knowledge of this than me.

looking at the symptoms logically, you'd have to say the problem is with the motherboard because swapping it lets XP load. But i cant think of something that would be wrong and would let it work to that point. Alternatively, the HDD might have a fault in a specific sector that is written to with your motherboard... but not written to with the other one you tried it successfully with. ahh, no u said the same problem happens with another HDD too. hmmm, stumped

[lelwyr]

Someone suggested disabling the external L1 cache...although im not sure why...he often suggests this when i have trouble installing windows...Haven't tried it yet so i'll let you know when i get the opportunity to.

[Doc Timbo]

L1 cache is like 8kB on the cpu.... do you mean L3 cache?