I recently ordered a custom computer from newegg and i got it today, i built it and everything went fine

i didnt have the hard drive, i just wanted to use my old one, so i popped into my nice shiny no-tool needed drive slot (sorry ima show off)

and i started this baby up, went through everything, my dualboot window, and when it started to load the xp loading screen it crahshed

i have tried to

1 boot vista

2 change bios settings

3 switch all my drives around and check jumpers

4 boot from a cd

now here is where i lose my expertise, when i try booting from the cd, it wont boot, all of my cd's just will not load, i set it to boot from cd first and even went into the boot menu in my boot process, after the post, and i cant even load an xp disk for a full format and reinstall

this is a real bummer and any one who can help i would appreciate it

it may be a bad cd player, as it was an older one, or because both the cd and hd are on the same ide

i have a new gigabyte s series model mobo

thank you

it is possible that it could be a bad cd drive. if you have both the cd drive and hard drive on the same IDE channel, I recommend that you separate them if you can. with the hard drive on the primary IDE channel and the cd drive on the secondary channel.
if you have no choice, then you need to make sure that the hard drive is the master and the cd drive is the slave. also make sure that the cd is not scratched.

i had made sure of the master and slave settings, and i have only one ide channel

i also have a sata to ide converter, but i think it may malfunction, then again maybe not, i havent tried it yet

i will try that again and i have a lot of cd's, none marked, and i know one is xp, i would look on another comp, but there isnt one with a functioning cd drive avaliable, i do appreciate the help, thank you

sure no problem

Lemme get this straight... you already had Vista installed, and now you are trying to add an XP installation? Or were those two OSes plus a boot manager originally working in the old sys, already on the drive you popped into your new sys?
If it is the latter, you need some new chipset drivers, and possibly a different hal, and..... it could be tricky.
Or have I got the problem by the wrong handle?

its the second, it was all installed, i realized, and feeling stupid being an it, that i was trying to boot from an xp dvd, on a cd drive, now that i got that figured out i need a new xp cd because some file that started with a is corrupt

"installation cannot continue, k?.? is corrupt, press any key to reboot"

it has ? because i cant remember what the file was, but thank you all for your help

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