Major Problem
 

Alright, moved into college dorm, everything going good until I start my computer.
3.2 GHz P4 Prescott
200GB IDE HDD
XP Pro

At the blue screen (login), the computer froze, nothing worked. Repeated this process 5 more times, same thing. Booted in safe mode, ran anti-virus/spyware/adware stuff, 100% clean. The computer being a week old, (no info to lose) I decide to reformat. Insert XP Pro install disc and it begins installation but repeats itself over and over. So now I have a useless piece of junk that won't install and decides that after 30 minutes of installation, it wants to restart the process over again.

Any help?

P.S. Tech guys at school suggested that the problem might be memory or PSU but I switched the RAM modules into different slots and (I have two sticks of 512) only used on stick to test the memory. Niether worked.

You may have scrached your hard drive when you moved. It dosen't take much to do that when your moving a PC around. If thats the case it would cause read errors and would stop XP from re-installing.

Goddamn I am pissed. Tech guys at my school don't know anything and I have no idea whatsoever what to do. I built it ymself so I cannot just send it back to like Dell or HP or etc.

this might be obvious to you but who knows..

in the middle of a windows install it does want to restart. if you set you boot to boot from the cd first it will ask to do so and start the install all over again. maybe that is whats happening? when the install restarts, take out the cd. wait for the install screen then put the cd back.

It just restarts the installation, never asking to restart the computer. It just goes from 8 minutes to finish to 34 minutes and repeat.

I'd go for possible harddrive damage. It's one of the only things that would make sense in this situation. Some kind of hardware failure would have to be the culprit, if multiple reinstallations can't solve the problem.

what does a scan disk turn up?

I would also remove any unneccessary PCI cards while you install. I had trouble one time installing xp on one of my computers, couldn't figure out what was going wrong, and figured it could be freezing while installing some other piece of hardware. After I removed the cards, it installed fine. Then I just reinstalled the cards after windows was already installed and it worked great.

Good luck.

At least try to get into the bios to change your boot priority. You never know, it could be that simple.

Yeah, I changed the boot priority before. It was set to my IDE HDD but now it is set to the Plextor CD to install Windows. Either way, the fucker won't work. I might have to RMA the HDD back to Newegg, I need my fucking computer though. Using my roommates computer gets annoying cuz only one of us can be on.

what about trying to boot up to a Knoppix ISO and see if you have any problems with hardware other then your hard drive? if you have a bad video card, RAM or anything else, i think you would have problems with running Knoppix off a CD so you will know it's not your hard drive.
I would also crack the case and make sure all the cards are seated tight. sometimes while moving a computer a NIC or something will become a little loose and cause all kinds of problems.
i had a bad stick of RAM that caused me to spend about 400 bucks replacing everything from the power supply to CPU to video card.... last thing i checked was RAM and that was the issue all along.

Well, after much yelling, cursing, and screaming, I am going to RMA the memory and HDD back to Newegg.

you should test both the hard drive and the memory with the ultimate boot cd before you rma it. why rma a part if it isn't bad?? be sure, that's all I'm saying.

Well, just to be safe, I did check the HDD and it is perfectly fine. Memory is OK too.
Motherboard is fried. FUCK. Time to RMA that bastard and rebuild it, losing a couple hours which I could be studying....fuck fuck fuck

how did you determine that the mobo is fried??

Hmm, normally you get nothing if the mobo is fried.