Ok,
I've been working all night on this update for my old system and I still cant get it to work :armed: . What I'm doing is upgrading from a system that previously had a 2.4gHZ P4, 1.5GB of Ram, 2 ATA harddrives, Windows XP Pro installed to a 2.4gHz Dual Core 2, 4GB of Dual Channel Ram, the same 2 ATA hard drives plus another 320gb SATA harddrive, and I still want to keep Windows XP Pro because my devices dont have 64bit drivers yet.

Ok so I bought everything and I put everything together and I thought it was just normal routine. I turn the system on and first I notice I cant get past the initial BIOS boot up screen. So I figured out that is was the SATA drive doing this (I still dont know why...mabe because I need specific MoBo drivers installed first?). So after I did that, it proceeded past the BIOS boot screen and commenced booting windows. Problem is, it never got to the logo and just cycled back to the BIOS boot screen again! So now I was in a loop! So I thought mabe it could be some settings on the board like mabe a wrong case connector or something. Nope. Preaty much I got everything right. Just in case though, I unplugged all the things I added to the board except the PCI periferals and just tryed booting from the bootable source with nothing else on the IDE channels. Same thing happened. So then I though mabe it could be the ram. So I took out 3 of 4 and just ran 1gb of ram. Same thing happened. So then I put them all back in. NOW A NEW PROBLEM CAME UP that I wasn't ready to deal with tonight. The moment I put back all four DIMMS, the PC speaker would let out this long tone indicating that it cant find any Ram!!! So I took out 1 DIMM and it said it was ok. Now I'm thinking that the MOBO is defective but mabe not which leads me to my question.

Can you run Windows XP Pro or Media Center using the Intel Core 2 Duo Chip? I know it's specifically a 64bit chip but from almost everyone that I've talked to, they said that you shouldn't have a problem. Though you're not using the chip to it's fullest ability, it still will be preaty fast. But I'm wondering that if because of this chip I'm not able to boot into Windows properly...I meen I've vaugly seen some systems built with this processor and Windows XP installed but I haven't made an in depth search. By the way, to validate if it was just my harddrive going bad or something else, I used a drive in my other computer with another Windows XP installation. Same thing happened. PLEASE HELP GUYS! Let me know what I can do! I need the power but if my only sollution is to get Vista then that's not going to work for me!

If you are not installing XP to a SATA drive then the driver issue should be moot. If it is a SATA2 (3X) hard drive and your motherboard only supports SATA1 (1.5X) then you need to change the jumper on the drive. But if this were the case then your BIOS would not even see the SATA drive.

Sometimes when you take a board to its Max RAM there are difficulties not seen with the same RAM not maxed.

What is the motherboard?

XP runs fine with this CPU. That is not an issue.

Did you load the latest BIOS?

A Clean Install of XP might also be consideration once you get the hardware stable.