cannot reinstall xp or get into safe mode

[W Enfield]

this is rather verbose but please bear with me.

My system:
Mobo: Asus a7v600
Previous Mobo: Epox 8kha+
Vid card: Radeon 9000 w/128mb vid ram
Proc: Athlon xp2200 (1.8 ghz)
512mb ram (Crucial Tech)
Master HD: 160gb with partition 1 of 60gb ( win me) (FAT32) and partition 2
of 100gb (win xp) (NTFS)
Slave Hd: one partition of 80gb
Aopen DVD - master cd
yamaha cdr - slave cd

i have been using xp for about 3 months with no serious problems. one day i
booted into xp and could not find my cd drives. i booted into my win me
partition to check and could only see my dvd drive. i shut down the comp and
replaced the 80 wire (ata 100) ide cables with new ones and rebooted. I
could not see the drives in bios. So i figured i had a bad mobo and
replaced it with the asus mobo. I set up the bios (conservative settings)
and booted into xp it seemed to go alright as xp installed all the mobo
resources. i had to reboot after the install of the via drivers and video
drivers ( these were on my hd). when i booted into xp i got some weird
error messages saying that some files hadn't loaded. i rebooted and from
then on i could not either load xp or get into safe mode. I figured i had a
h/w conflict and started pulling my SB Live card and dvd hardware decoder
card. I double checked the bios to make sure the onboard ac 97 sound was off
as well as the integrated network card. i pulled the cable to my cd drives
and my second hd. I still could not either boot into xp or get into safe
mode. I tried to use my win me partition to try and get help and i could
not load that either, although i could get into safe mode. nothing i tried
worked. I booted using the emer boot disk and tried to reinstall win me
(restore did not work) win me was doa. I booted using the win xp install cd
and everytime i tried it locked up when checking the hd (checking hd 0...on
atapi). I removed the hd installed an old (good but too small) and the xp
installer locked up and the same place. I figured there had to be a h/w
conflict somewhere, but the onboard h/w is disabled, i am using a new cdr
drive with new cables, i replaced the keyboard, mouse, floppy drive and vid
card with a geforce4 mx (new) (just as a test). by now i have nothing that
i can see that will cause a conflict nothing on the usb except the mouse and
keyboard and everything else is new, I am writing this using win 98se since
i was able to get that to work. my comp was down for a week. I can see
absolutely nothing that i am doing wrong or any bios settings that would
cause xp to not work. I have a LOT of critical files on the win
xppartition.. what am i going to have to check?? what the heck am i doing
wrong??? right now win 98 works with the onboard sound. i reinstalled the
radeon 9000 and installed the drivers and also the via 4 in 1 drivers. i do
not seem to have a hardware failure anywhere as all the hardware works fine
in win 98. I ran Doc Mem on my ram and even with the most severe test could
find no errors. HELP!!!!

sorry for the verbosity but i wanted to cover everything

Thanks in advance

 

[Steve C. Ray]

You should have done a repair installation after you changed the
motherboard. Try it now, although it may not work because of all the other
things you tried. Boot from the XP CD (you may have to set the BIOS to have
the CD drive as the first boot device). After booting from the XP CD press
Enter at the first screen (do not select recovery console). Press F8 on the
next screen to accept the license agreement, then push R on the next screen
to repair your existing installation of XP. Normally you won't lose any
settings or data with a Repair, but you will have to reload all updates,
starting with SP1.