Installing Os woes

Dear all

I have recently built a new system and have come to the stage of installing the operating system onto it.
I have encountered numerous problems installing xp (for budget reasons) onto the sata hardrive and a 80gb drive (also sata) from an old Dell has not been able to boot normally without a Bsod.
I have then asked a friend to load up a version of win7 onto the original hardrive and this has gone well until the point where it asks to boot normally, where it just stops at the windows is starting point.
Am i missing something large or is there a problem with some of my hardware, and if so are there any solutions?

Thanks in advance

P.s. If it helps the build is an
Amd PhenomII 955
Msi 790fxGd70
crucial Ballistix 1333
Ati radeon 4870 512
maxtor 320gb standard hard drive

the version of xp is 32 bit and the win7 was 64 according to friend

What kind of power supply does it have? I've had problems with xp not installing when the power supply is giving out too much voltage on the +5V rail. It's something to do with the hard drive not getting an acceptable voltage, but I'm not convinced that this is the problem in your case.

What is the problem with installing xp?

have you access to another machine?

If so try using nLite and intergrating the SATA drivers for your board into the windows XP install.

That is the most common problem with windows xp and sata installers

How much ram do you have installed? If you have more than 2gb of ram installed, that can cause issues with an XP install. Reduce the ram to 2gb or less, attempt the install again. Once it's complete, reinstall the rest of the ram. :)

Hi again,
I want to thank all of you for your posts as my computer now boots to windows seven :)
I tried the easiest option first and took out one of the ram sticks (FYI it was 4gb so luke122 may have been right) and forgot to plug in keyboard when turning it on and it promptly went to Windows start normally kind of screen and to my amazement began to boot after I decided to try anyway

thanks so much for all your posts and they were all appreciated very much
:)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by nevermind1534

What kind of power supply does it have? I've had problems with xp not installing when the power supply is giving out too much voltage on the +5V rail. It's something to do with the hard drive not getting an acceptable voltage, but I'm not convinced that this is the problem in your case.

What is the problem with installing xp?

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the psu is a 600 watt stealth ocz and the xp problem was a sudden bsod shortly after formatting

Then the PSU is probably fine.