I just upgraded from an old Athlon XP setup on a GA K7 Triton board to a Foxconn Winfast NF4K8AC with Athlon 64 3500+, brand new 450W PSU and a 256Mb Nvidia 6800 GS (GDDR3).

When I hook everything up it all seems to be going fine - it goes through the post screen, picks up my drives, tests the memory, registers the CPU - and then tries to start Windows. The 'Windows loading' screen starts to fade up, but before it can a blue screen flashes up too quick for me to see what it says (although I can see it's not the typical BSOD) and the system resets to the beginning of the startup process once again.

I've tested the cables, I've tried it from both IDE slots, I've tried disconnecting everything but the HDD, I've tried starting in safe mode and normal mode, I've triple checked that all the case hookups are connected right, I've tried resetting the CMOS ... and yet every time exactly the same thing happens. Both the RAM and the HDD are working fine with my old board and CPU and I'm getting a picture through so the new graphics card seems to be okay.

Does anyone have any idea what might be going wrong? It's driving me nuts. I'm not using a 64 bit version of Windows - could that be an issue? Do I need a hard drive that uses SATA connectors? I'm all out of ideas.

T. :-|

Did you reinstall Windows? The motherboard is excellent. The other stuff you report shows you have done the installation correctly. But if the Windows was already on the hard drive from the other board, Windows will detect this as a new Machine. If you are using an OEM Windows version, just install the disc in the repair mode. You will also have to re-register with Microsoft.
If this is any other Windows version or disc, tell us more.

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