i am assembling a new system and am having trouble getting xp to load. about 2 years ago, i bought a 3 pack of xp sp2 from vioware. all three were packaged as OEM, unopened and with COA's. i used 2 of the cd's on computers donated to a school; the cd's loading easily and worked just fine. i kept the last one for future use. the future is now, as newegg has some motherboards and cpu's that were the right price and configuration. i have a new seagate 300gb sata hd, 2gb of crucial ram, an amd 4450e cpu and a gigabyte ga-ma74gm-s2 board. all components are listed as compatible by the various manufacturers. when i try to load the xp cd on the hd, it does absolutely nothing. the cd player spins for about 5 seconds, the monitor says to "boot from cd", and the cd stops spinning. i have tried with a hot start and a cold start. i rma'd the first board back and got a second one that does the same thing. i have talked to gigabyte tech support and the setup is ok. he suggested that i call microsoft about the software. i can get the gigabyte driver cd to play but not the xp cd. does microsoft have a time limit on these things? i have tried using 2 other xp cd's from prior installations that i have used to re-install (not the school installs) and nothing from microsoft will play on the cd player or the hd.
ps: i just tried to install ubuntu 7 and it does the same thing. no response from the mobo. it will play the gigabyte recovery cd, but nothing else. please help me, before i use all this stuff as target practice. i have a feeling there is a problem with the mobo bios setup, but am at wits end to find the solution. thank you for any replies. Peace and God bless.
ps: i just tried to install ubuntu 7 and it does the same thing. no response from the mobo. it will play the gigabyte recovery cd, but nothing else. please help me, before i use all this stuff as target practice. i have a feeling there is a problem with the mobo bios setup, but am at wits end to find the solution. thank you for any replies. Peace and God bless.