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One other thing: you have a new motherboard, but you did not mention the case, etc.
Did this go into an older case? If so, what type power supply?
From the manual:
Quote:
The power supply with 20-pin or 24-pin cables can both be connected to this 24-pin connector.
Connect from pin-1 for either type. However, a 20-pin power supply may cause the system
unstable or even unbootable for the sake of insufficient electricity. A minimum power of 300W
or higher is recommended.
That is a good point IKnowNot,
The old case may not be delivering enough power, even if the specifications say that it does. PSUs do tend to deteriorate with time.
Mixing memory types is never a good idea anyway. At best it will work, but only with the performance of the lowest strip.
In this case, both strips (PC2100 and PC2700) are below the recommended spec for the board, so performance will be substandard, even if you get it to work. I don't see the point in buying a high performance board then crippling it by attaching crappy memory?
Over here, Crucial is relatively cheap............. I believe it is assembled in Scotland.
The real winner is that they will ship it for free using our Post Office's "special delivery" service. This is useful, as not many people are likely to be in when DHL and the like arrive (usually in the middle of the day). With the post office you can just go down there and pick it up........... In my case DHL are 70 miles away! and the Post Office is a ten minute walk.
EDIT: Just had a thought, whilst you are troubleshooting it might be an idea to go into the BIOS setup and disable the memory options such as caching and shadowing?
Go into the bios and reset it to the default settings. Use the newest stick of memory, just one, then try it with a boot CD. Preferably a live Linux CD. A live cd will give you a pretty good idea whether or not your hardware's working. Forget Windows for now.
Then check the jumper settings on the HDD (hard drive). I just put together an older unit the other night, and kept getting an I/O error. I've got one HDD on this thing and the jumper was set to master. I had a cable with 3 connectors (one for the board, two for drives). After switching the jumper to CS (cable select), the thing worked.
Hmmmm,
This is curious. From PT's account he has tried different HDDs and he has certainly tried some known good RAM that meets the MoBo specifications.
From what he says, the OS load gets so far then crashes. He has at least 512Mb of RAM and the HDDs have been reformatted, so it doesn't sound like a resource issue.
Incompatible RAM and a weak power supply would promote systems instability, but I wouldn't expect it to produce a consistent failure to load an operating system half way through.
Temperature issues could cause the system to crash after a fairly consistent time, but NOT with that particular error message. The machine is still functioning to give you the error message?
The media drive is obviously OK as it recognises the OS disk and gets half way with processing it.
I don't see this as a video issue as the OS loads in minimal settings mode, and actually gets a part of the way through installation.
I am starting to suspect the actual media itself?
So that leads me to ask:
Is this a genuine Microsoft Win XP CD or is it a copy?
I would suggest borrowing another (genuine) copy and using that to try to load the OS. The actual CD is not relevant to Microsoft's DRM for Windows XP and it is perfectly legal to do this. The controls are that you have a genuine product key and that you register (activate) within 30 days.
The circumstances described would be consistent with a corrupted or damaged CD. Perhaps a careful cleaning of the CD might help?
;)
EDIT: This is a useful free tool from Nero for testing optical drives and media. Obviously it won't tell you if a file's integrity is inherently compromised, as can happen when you copy stuff.
http://www.cdspeed2000.com/download.html