Darant do you have UDMA drives? If so do you have them on 80pin IDE cables?
Okay here is what I would do (just a suggestion):

Put the Hard drive you are installing Windows to on the first connector on the cable plugged into IDE1, Makes sure the jumper on the hard drive (little plastic thing that sits across a pair of pins near where the IDE and power cables plug in) is set to master.
Make sure if the CDRom and HD are on the same cable that HD is master and CDROM is set to slave.
If you want you can put your CDROM drive on a seperate IDE cable on IDE 2 and have it set as master.
Think what bonzoe was refering to in his post is that its easier to diagnose the problems before windows is installed as you are guaranteed that its a hardware problem. Introducing software would increase the risk of adding a software fault too which would confuse the situation.
For the primary install I would suggest only having your hard-drive, CDROM and graphics card installed. Take anything else out if its plugged into the mobo. If you aren't hearing any beeps when you power up then it would suggest that no hardware faillure has been detected. (Doesn't rule it out though)

right. What about the processors? Do I enclude them at the start? Im hearing no bleeps. When you say first connector, is that from the top or bottom of the cable.

First connector from the end connected to the mobo. Is there a connector on the end of the cable that is a different colour?
Plug your CPUs in mate, no CPU no work ;)

Bit late in on this..sorry.

There is no 'primary master or slave on the motherboard' ! Just two (or more) IDE channels.
Both can carry 'master' and 'slave'. Your HDD should be set as master on Primary IDE1 with one end (the blue connector) of its 40 pin connector plugged into the mobo's Primary IDE1 and the other end (that is the last connector point) plugged into the back of the HDD (make sure the jumper on the back of the HDD is set to master).
The CD should be plugged into Primary IDE2 similarly (again jumpered as master).

I personally think the boot sequence in the BIOS should be set to:

1st...floppy
2nd...IDE1 (HDD)
3rd...IDE2 (CD-ROM/RW)

That way on your first re-boot after the system has copied the OS files off the setup CD it will try to boot from your HDD where enough files should be present to afford a start up.

Just to correct this somewhat...

On the 80 pin UDMA Drive cables, the blue connector (usually blue anyway) goes to the MOTHERBOARD, the first connector from that is GREY, this goes to the SLAVE device, the BLACK connector (at the opposite end of the cable) goes to the MASTER device (typically the first hard drive on the system, and yes, make sure it IS set to master)

use a 40 OR 80 pin cable to connect to the CD Rom, if you have a DVD and a Writer, mount the DVD top in the case and set it to MASTER, put the writer below it and set it to SLAVE (makes the drive letters match the order of the drives and also simplifies the cable run)

Set ALL drive settings in the bios to AUTO...

in the bios, DISABLE Trend ChipAway Antivirus (if you have the option) and ENABLE S.M.A.R.T.

leave everything else on defaults. Boot the machine and see if XP installs.

Lord Nikon..

What do you think of my suggestion as to the boot sequence ??

I think trying to boot from the CD is flawed in that it will re-enter 'set up' and try to re-copy all the setup files ?

Shouldn't do basa...

When XP detects the presence of a bootable hard drive partition it says "Press Any Key to boot from CD......" for about 10 seconds, then boots from the hard drive.

Only when there is no bootable hard drive partition will it boot back to the CD again.

Although IF the drive was formerly used on an NT based system as an extended slave drive then the drive may not have a primary partition on it. So it is an idea to let XP wipe the existing partition tables and create its own partitions from scratch.

What about the HD itself. It sounds like the initial part of the install went on OK. Just the reboot didn't carry on the installation.

Could be

* Memory
Could have faulty memory as previously mentioned

* HD Partition (previous probs with partitions over 2 Gig)
There have been documented incidents with XP that show that installing on large drives causes problems.

* Video
The screen is black (?) could be a prob with the card switching modes.

If the IDE cable was wrong i.e using 40 when should be 80, the drive wouldn't be recognised, would it ?

Why not go back to basics and put a DOS partition on the machine. Prove some basic stuff b4 putting Windows on it ?

My thoughts are the drive partition or the memory...

a black screen can be caused by a problem with the hard drive boot sector, if it is only partially complete then it will tell the system to boot from it, then hang...

I would suggest wiping the drive partitions then letting XP set them up, if that fails, then change the Ram...

As for problems installing XP onto large drives, I have personally installed XP onto 200Gb hard drives in Compaq Evo machines without problems...

Black screen? Darant was getting to the loading screen with the moving bar. (page 1 post 13 on thread)
Personnaly I would take the suggestions here about getting the drives on the right cables and the jumpers set right, I would then restart the install and let XP format the drive again and see what happens next.

If the PC doesn't work, you need to find out (diagnose) what is causing it to not work!!!! If it will not perform simple tasks from a bootable floppy there is absolutely no point trying to install Windows of any variety.

If you don't understand that concept, get a mate to help you, preferably someone with some experience. I would be happy to help, but it is very difficult on a forum. If you live near me, bring it round.

ive spoken to someone at work who also thinks that it could be a memory problem. I need to get another lot to try. I'm not gonna try again tonight cos i knackered and am getting an early one!!!!

I appreciate all of your help and will repost tomorrow.

goodnight.

Download memtest86, it creates a bootable floppy and automatically tests your memory. More reliable than fitting some more memory, you will probably need a list of failures to get faulty memory replaced, most retailers accept memtest86 errors as evidence.

How do you know that replacement memory is good in your setup without testing same?

right, Im still having probs with this. I have tried other memory, now I keep getting blue screens of death............

Im very desperate to get this up and running

As I said before, you need to test the memory to see if it IS OK without errors, just sticking in different memory is OK only when it fixes the fault.

If you can test your memory in another PC & it is OK, I would suspect memory timing (set to default settings in BIOS if you can) OR a faulty motherboard.