CANNOT RE INSTALL WINDOWS

[Guest]

hi

i had vista home premium edition installed on my machine and for some reason
it was picking up my Seagate ST3200822A Barracuda Plus 200GB as offline, so i
thought it will work if i just do a format, so i plugged it into my other
machine and backed the data up. (Then the problems started) i put it back
into the vista machine and vista would not load, said there was a hardware
problem, told me to put the installation dvd back in the drive and ran a
repair tool. so i put the vista installation dvd into the dvd drive and chose
to boot from the dvd. A message appeared saying "please wait loading
files", the progress bar fills up and then nothing! it seems the machine just
crashes! so i cant even re install windows!!

then i thought i could reinstall xp back and get some functionality, when
the machine boots off the xp cd, the setups starts and i get the blue install
screen, then it hangs on "starting windows setup!" i took the drive out and
put it in my other machine as a slave and then formatted it. I put it back
into the vista machine and still no joy! ive cleared bios and i still cant
install windows!


can anyone help me?? is there a motherboard reset that i can do?


thanks

my spec is :

Gigabyte GA-7N400PRO2 motherboard
Crucial 2gb DDR 400MHz/PC3200
Maxtor 40 IDE HD
Seagate ST3200822AS Barracuda 200GB
AMD Athlon XP3200+ Socket A Barton
Sapphire Radeon X1650 PRO

 

[Guest]

i had the same problem, here's what i did:
if you have a spare video card that's not x1600 series, you can use the
spare one to install your vista. after installation completes, turn off the
computer, change the video card to your x1650, start the computer in safe
mode (you have to have the ati extracted driver handy on your harddrive), in
device manager, click on the card and click update the driver, then choose
manually locate driver, locate your extracted ati driver, it'll automatically
install it, then restart in normal mode.
microsoft just screwed up on their installation driver for x1600 series,
they put the wrong version (incompatible) on the dvd