Help!!! Building A Comp, Its Not Good!!!!!

[reroutetoremain]

im trying to help my friend program his computer... and were having a bunch of trouble, maybe someone can help... We got his comp from tiger direct, barebones kit, a maxtor 160gb hard drive, and a dvd drive. At first we got everything together, reset the cmos, and started up. Everything was working fine besides a ringing noise. We didnt mess with the bios, and got past the prompts, to where it said insert boot disket. We inserted xp, home, and started to run it. It took about an hour, until we finnaly shut down the comp and tried again. This time it took about twenty minutes, and a screen (within the blue screen of death) said that it couldnt find a hard drive, (whcih was displayed as the slave in config. 1 on the bios). We know the bios is reading the drive, but i think it should be the master, where the dvd/cdrom is. Now, the comp gets to where it asked for the boot disket, but instead just locks up where it says... "Verifiing DMI pool data..... Update sucess" and thats where it wont stop freezing. Hopefully someone can help me find out why its locking up, and how i can finnaly get xp installed. Ive been trying for hours...

 

[BobTheBuilder]

bad ram?

 

[adamorris]

Check jumper settings on your HD. Set it to either cable select or set it to a horizontal setting on the bottom row of pins. If it's set to either master or slave it might not work if it is the only HD in the system. Chech your bios settings and make sure it's detecting it as the master and you can use it as a boot device. Hope it works out for you.