Text based installation - halts at "Please Wait will Setup Starts Windows"

[Mikey]

I purchased a copy of Windows XP Professional. I am using
the following installation method. Boot from CD-ROM.
Setup during the text based portion copys the necessary
files, then I get a message that setup is starting
windows. Then I wait and wait. The CD-ROM starts to spin
down, no activity on the HDD. I've let it sit for 30
mintues and nothing happens. I have also booted into
Windows 2000 and then tried that installation
method...same outcome.

PC specs are as follows:

Processor: AMD Athalon Thunderbird (900Mhz)
Memory: 256 MB
HDD: Formatted (FAT32) 20GB - Western Digital
Network Card: Linksys
Sound Card: Sound Blaster 5.1
Video - NVida GeForce 2 w\ 128mb VRAM
Motherboard - Soyo SY-K7VTA with a VIA KT133 chipset

If anyone has an information that I might have missed
please email me directly with the email address in this
post. Thanks for the help.

 

[Richie]

Try the same bootable installation method, but let the XP installation
reformat the drive.

Rich

 

[Mike Biehl]

Richie-

Thank you for your suggestion. I have tried that. Here
is what happens. I boot with the XP CD in the CD-ROM
drive. I then boot the PC. The install starts and gets
throught copying some files. Then down in the lower left
corner in a gray bar a message appears "Starting
Windows." At that point nothing happens. I can not even
get to the point to allow the install to format the hard
drive.

The only idea that I can come up with, is that since I
have 2 physical hard drives in the PC. One is set to be
the Master the other is set to slave. The drive that is
set as Master also run Windows 2000 Professional. The
Slave is just a blank drive, there is no data. I figured
I would take the Master drive (windows 2000), and remove
that from the system, leaving only the slave drive. I am
going to see if that works.

If you have any suggestions that may help me out at this
point, I would appreciate you letting me know.

Thanks again!

Mike