XP won't finish install after reboot

[Guest]

I have a system at home that was running Win2k, no problems. I decided to
upgrade to Win XP Pro like I use in my office. Ran the system check for XP
compatibility and everything checked good. Tried doing upgrade, but after
initial setup completed and system rebooted, I see the Win XP logo for a
minute or so, then it goes black for a second, then to a dark grey screen
with one pixel lit in the upper left corner. Nothing after that.

Ended up reformatting entire hard drive, gonna do a clean install, not an
upgrade. Same thing happens - gets to Win Logo screen, then goes to grey
screen with single pixel.

I had a brand new 80gig drive I was going to put in another system. Never
been used. Installed it, pulled everything out that I could except the video
card (an ATI Radeon 7500 All-in-wonder). Only had the mouse, keyboard, and
monitor connected externally, and only one CD drive, hard drive, and stick of
memory installed. Same grey screen!

Tried setting BIOS to fail-safe defaults and optimized defaults - same
result.

Tried using the XP Pro disk I used when I built my office computer 2 months
ago, just to make sure my new copy of XP Pro wasn't the cause. Same results.

Tried re-installing Win2k SP4 from OEM disk. It won't go past the Win2k logo
screen.

Now what? Is this a sign that I need a new computer?
Computer is an AMD Athlon XP1600, 512Meg DDR, Soyo Dragon MoBo, and I've
tried a Seagate 120Gb IDE drive and a Western Digital 80Gb IDE drive. Never
had a problem with this computer in over 3 years - until now!

Any advice would be much appreciated.

 

[Guest]

I had a similar problem. You could try disabling the external cache in the
BIOS settings. My situation was solved by swapping CPU's for the install from
a AMD xp3000+ to a xp2200+. Worked fine swapped the CPU's back over and now
all is good. However, I did run a memory test after the loadup and found
there were faults in the RAM. After a bit of research it appears that errors