Ok, I've got another one.  I have another laptop here I'm trying to get XP installed on. This one was raw and had no OS before the attempted XP install.  I can get it to boot from the disk, and load the files, but it hangs on the "Windows setup" screen where it says "setup is starting windows".  I've removed the harddrive and partitioned and formatted it as NTFS and I'm still hanging up on the windows setup screen.  I know the install disk is good, and the hard drive seems to be good.  Could there be another hardware issue here?  Any ideas?

Thanks,

Anthony

A. Shoemaker wrote  it hangs on the "Windows setup" screen where it says "setup is starting windows".  I've removed the harddrive and partitioned and formatted it as NTFS and I'm still hanging up on the windows setup screen.

Disable "native SATA support" option from BIOS of your laptop , save the config and then try!

dear friend

               first of all replace the ide cable of the harddisk.remember if ide cable is faulty it doesn,t mean it will not be identified by BIOS ie logical contol wires may be fine but data pin bay be damaged.

                  Use win98 startup disk and boot in ramdrive. you will get a 3rd party tool called diskmanager its a seagate technology , so if yours  hdd is seagate use dm command for others give a /x switch . insite dm you will get the options for formatting the disk dont go for a quick format rather go for normal format . normal format will find bad sectors on your disks and will keep them aside will not use for any other purpose. after rebbot try for installing.

if problem persists check the ide cable for ATAPI ie cdrom if possible replace both cdrom and ide cable. 

hope u will recovered

with regards

Gautam