Okay, background info... My current hard drive is old, the oldest piece of hardware in my computer. I've had it for a long time and it's been very reliable, but I don't want it to just die on me one day and leave me with a whole bunch of lost data.

So I went out and bought a new Western Digital 250gb SATA hard drive. Hooked it up and went to install windows. The install went fine, but when I went to start up windows after taking the CD out, it would ALWAYS freeze on the loading screen.

I tried everything I could to see if I could fix it, but I couldn't. So, I took it back to the place I bought it, they checked it out, and it was fine, but I ended up exchanging it for the same hard drive, but was IDE instead of SATA..

So, I get home, hook the IDE hard drive up, install windows on it, and when I go to start windows up without the CD, what happens??? FREEZES IN THE LOADING SCREEN!

I'm at a total loss here, I have absolutely NO idea why it is doing this. I plug in my old hard drive and it works absolutely fine. If I plug in both, they both show up.

PLEASE HELP!

It sometimes takes a LONG time for Windows to finish installing especially on a large hard drive.

Having said that, is your motherboard capable of handling XP and do you have all the XP compliant drivers for all the devices you installed?

Is your computer able to support Win XP
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/up...ng/default.mspx

New Installation with Windows XP
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/s...installnew.mspx

Did you setup motherboard for XP?

In the CMOS Setup:
Start with Load Optimized Defaults.

In Standard CMOS Features, is your hard disk detected. If it's on IDE1, jumpered as Master, it should show up under IDE Channel 0 Master. Press Enter at this entry and press Enter again at the IDE HDD Auto-Detection.

In Advanced BIOS Features, have CD-ROM as your First Boot Device and Hard Disk as your Second Boot Device. Then, press Enter at the Hard Disk Boot Priority entry and select your hard disk. Do the same with CD-ROM Boot Priority.

In Integreated Peripherals, press Enter at OnChip IDE Device. Press Enter at IDE Function Setup. Enable IDE OnChip Channel 0 and 1. Enable IDE Prefetch Mode and IDE DMA Transfer Access.
Disable OnChip SATA Controller and SATA DMA Transfer. Back out one menu and go into RAID Config and ensure that everything is Disabled.

Reenter all of your other customizations if any.