Question : Windows XP Setup loop

The system is an AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core 60-FX, 1.5 GB RAM, IDE 0 1 master 1 slave (jumpers set accordingly) IDE 1 1 Master Optical drive, CPU is brand new, PCIE video card nvidia 7800 (will double check that when i get home), 650 watt PS,  Memory is new and I have tried both a Foxconn and EVGA motherboard (socket 939). BIOS detects all the proper drives and POSTs The HD's (IDE) come from my old system with WIN XP PRO SP 2. When I installed them into my new setup Windows would not boot, I would get an error message:

Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.

Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

The drives are partitioned so I did a clean install on partition C:. After setup wrote the files to the HD it would either loop back to the setup screen (If the system was set to boot from cd first) or give a Non boot disk failure error (if set to HD first), it has done this with 3 different HD's all formated and fresh installed, with 3 different XP install discs.

I have tried chkdsk /r, bootcfg /rebuild, expand %cd drive%:\i386\ntoskrnl.ex_ C:\Windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe, resetting BIOS, pulling the BIOS battery letting it sit over night, fresh installs, switching the master to IDE 1 instead of 0, switching optical drives, switching Mobo's, using different IDE cables, disabling the SATA ports. In the repair console I can see c:\windows\system32 and also %cd drive%\i386. I have booted to windows with a IDE drive out of a working system only to get the "Hardware configuration" error on the same drive after a reboot. I have not yet tried a SATA drive as a bootable master (i will this weekend)

I am at a total loss about what I should do next.

Answer : Windows XP Setup loop

If I read your set up correctly,   you have 2 hard drives... one set as master, and one set to slave... correct?  The 1st thing I would do is remove the slave drive.  I have had problems in the past,  when trying to install a new OS,  that it would cause some problems,  especially if the slave drive also has an OS installed on it.  Once your OS is installed,  you should be able to plug the slave drive back in.

Something else to think about...

I had a similar problem with a laptop recently,  and I found that the hard drive had a hidden partition that was causing all of the issues.  I removed all of the partitions and reformatted and then did a complete reinstall of the OS.  Everything when perfect after I did this