Perpetual reboot on fresh XP SP2 install

[Guest]

I'm doing a repair job for a client of mine. This computer is a Dell
Dimension 8400, it came in with a busted SATA Hard Drive and it was replaced.
After a small mix-up with finding the correct SATA drivers for the
motherboard, I got an install of XP w/ SP1 installed, and it seemed to work.
Unfortunately, after the install, it would momentarily display the Windows XP
boot screen with the moving blue bar at the bottom. then restart. Then it
told me Windows couldn't boot up properly, so I tried booting with the Last
Good Config, then in Safe Mode w/ networking. On the safe mode boot-up, the
last system file shown on the screen before the reboot was Mup.sys.

So then I loaded BartPE, a third-party boot-from-cd utility that uses XP
core files to do some diagnostic work on a computer, like Spyware/Virus
clean-ups and other things that you can't do to a running computer usually
because Windows is using the system HDD. Actually, all I did with BartPE was
use Symantec Ghost to get a universal Ghost image we made with the Universal
Imaging Utility onto the computer. It transferred alright, but when I booted
up the computer, again, I got a perpetual reboot. I tried booting to safe
mode again, and as luck would have it, my good buddy Mup.sys waves "Hello" to
me before the computer reboots.

I honestly don't know what's going on. I've had this issue before on a
couple of Dell computers, but the universal image usually works. Any ideas on
this?

 

[Guest]

After doing some research, it seems that saying that Mup.sys was the last
thing to load would not help much.

I did is again with the "Disable automatic restart on system faliure" option
on the XP boot menu, and got this STOP error:

*** STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF7C85528, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

It's the same thing every time.

I will also note that I had to install a third-party driver dirung windows
setup in order to get windows setup to recognize this computer's SATA hard
drive and controller.

 

[Guest]

Ok, never mind...

I think I did something in the BIOS setup along the lines of stopping the
system from treating SATA drives like RAID drives, so it works now. Odd...