[jibberia]

I have a no-activation volume license version of XP Pro. My friend used this exact CD (burned from an ISO) to upgrade one of his computers from winME to XP. I have gone through hell with it. Long story short, the installation goes fine, and when its all done, on the first boot, I see the black "Loading Windows XP" screen that usually appears for a very short time. The progress bar moves about halfway across (actually not a bar, its just 3 blue blobs, but it works the same way), the 3 lights on my keyboard (numlock, capslock, scrollock) flash, and it hangs. I can then turn numlock on and off, but not capslock or scrollock. Ctrl-alt-delete doesn't work. I can boot into safe mode. I have tried reinstalling it, even gone to the point of reformatting my drive. Still no go. I KNOW that XP will work on this machine, as I ran a beta of it hitch-free for 15 days (until I had to activate . My machine is more than powerful enough. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Oh and yes, it does this every time, not 1 in 3 like some people have posted...

[jibberia]

Thanks so much for your quick and detailed reply!
I did the following:
Rebooted from safe mode...
Pressed F8, selected logged boot...
Let it continue to boot and crash...
Reset the power, selected Safe mode...
search for bootlog.txt, none exists.
Am I still doing something wrong?

[jibberia]

Okay, there are lots of errors, but one that stands out to me is a repeated ACPI error. I'm going to head into my bios and try disabling/messing with it. I'll post more errors in a minute, if this doesnt work.
Thanks!

[jibberia]

Well, that didn't work. The other errors are related to things not working in safe mode. The acpi errors are probably related to that too. Though, the keyboard lights blinking sure sound like ACPI to me. There is no option in my bios to simply disable it, but I have most options disabled. Any other suggestions?

[Speed4Ever]

jibberia,

Please post your computer specs, the more specific the better.