It's me again with this XP lunacy. Here's the history of the problem.
For some long days and even longer nights I've been trying to put together:
MOTHERBOARD
MB ABIT® IC7-G i875/ICH5-R chipset, Socket 478, 800MHz BUS, ATX format, Intel® P4, audio, Gigbit LAN on board
CPU
Intel P4 - 2.4 GHz
RAM
DDRAM 512MB PC400 APACER® CL2.5
HD
MAXTOR® DiaMaxPLUS® 160GB 8MB CACHE SERIAL ATA
GC
VGA ManLi GeForce FX 5200 128MB TV OUT 8xAGP LITE
BOX
Midi MS® 350W
XP and MAXTOR drivers installation all goes OK, but when I'm trying to start it up the machine freezes (quite early on XP start-up gif thing). First I thought it was because of MAXTOR (larger than 137GB), so I replaced it with my old WD ATI only to get the same result. I tried Win2000 and it worked just fine (barring HD which now pretended to be of 33 GB). I used MAXTOR bootable CD to setup the HD (OK) and reinstalled XP. Of course it got frozen again (very same point). I tried Safe Mode and it worked! And HD seemed to be OK this time. Now what can be wrong with Normal Mode?