The question I should have asked is are you booting to your hard drive or are you still booting the XP CD?

I will try that in the Pm tomorrow, my misunderstanding about going to Safe Mode, Yes The CD is still in the Rom

If you successfully installed XP then you should not have the CD in the drive.

So I am assuming that XP has not been installed. So Safe Mode is moot.

Can you describe exactly what you go thru when you boot?

Each time you are trying to Install XP? correct?

See if you can find in the following link where your setup freezes:

http://michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

Look at the screen shots on the left menu. Click to enlarge.


________________________________

It does the formatting and then checks the drive if I remember correctly and the it loads the files, initializes them and then it goes to the XP screen with box in the center with Blue Dots running across the box, those blue dots stop moving after 4 times across the box, I try to turn the machine off in the front of it and it won't turn off, have use rocker switch in rear, Like I said before, I have left it for 3 hrs and still frozen, appreciate your help with this, hope I am being clear enough.

It is strange that you see that splash screen during installation.

Have you looked thru this post:

http://michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

Look at the screen shots on the left menu. Click to enlarge.

Do you recognise all these steps?

I will look at the web later this afternoon and see how far it shows I'am getting

Paulgm,

I am also using a 848P-A Mother Board with an Intel Pentium 4 Processor, although mine is 2.8GHZ with a Seagate 160G HD, 512M RAM a Nvidea video card.

I built this system almost a year ago, running Win '98. I recently went to install XP Pro, and am having the same problem you are. I took out the old drive (I'll hook it later as a slave to get my data off it), and installed a new Seagate 160G drive. I installed XP Pro, and it installed and worked as expected. I then tried to install SP2, and it seemed to be ok, till it came for the final boot.

The 3 blue squares scroll across in the little rectangle, 3 1/2 times and then stop.

When I tried Safe Mode, about a screen and a half of file names scroll by, and it stops at, well... I don't remember the name of the file but I have it written down at work.

My SP2 is an official Microsoft CD that was used once before to unstall SP2 and that install was successful.

I reformatted the drive and did it again, with the same problem. I then did it AGAIN, but with a friends XP Pro with SP2 CD, and had the SAME PROBLEM!

As soon as I can I'm going see if there is a BIOS update.

Else I may get a new MoBo.

If you get your system running let me know what you did.

Stan,
I have worked on this problem for close to 30 hrs, with no luck, I went back installed my Windows 2000 disk with no problems so far, If I find a solutions I will pass it on.
Thanks, Paulgm

Paulgm, I'm at work now with my notes. Back in my previous post when I said it stopped in Safe Mode, the file it stopped at was agp440.sys. I Disabled this file (see http://support.microsoft.com.aspx??scid=kb;en-us;324764 ). Then it stopped at MUP.sys, so I disabled it too. Then it stopped at NDIS, and I disabled it. Now it stops at something else. I've just about given up. If I disable everything I don't think it'll run.

Now when it tries to boot, the blue boxes scroll by just half a time, then I get a split second of a blue screen with 3 or 4 pagargaphs of text on it, and it reboots.

I think it's the main board(?). When I google 848P-A Problem I get a few hits explaining similar problems and others telling me this is a crappy board and a crappy chipset.

Wish us luck...

Originally Posted by paulgm

It freezes same place every time, loadseverything up and comes up on XP screen with blue Dots running across the box, about 4 times across it freezes, have left it sit as long as 3hrs, still in same place I left it at.

I have had exactly the same problem. Upon re-installing XP my computer would freeze on boot up at the scrolling blue dots screen after 6 scrolls.

I was infected with a startpage virus and needed to re-format my machine.
After removing all hardware, different HDD's etc I found out what the problem was and it was infact quite simple.

I have a tiny(time) machine with an MSI ms6787 mobo.

It appeared that this mobo is NOT compatible for WIN XP SP2. As my lastest version of XP included service pack 2 it installed sp2 files upon the installation causing the freezing.

I dug out my old version of WIN XP without any sp's and it continued to load fine.
I installed SP1 and it was fine. I installed SP2 from a full SP disc and then it froze again on boot up.

So, to summarize, just try an pre-sp2 WIN XP installation disc and don't install SP2 ever.