Short version. Try different RAM.
Sunday I had similar eXPerience installing to a perfectly clean known good hard drive
with the absolute minimum hardware.
My two sticks of RAM suddenly became incompatible with each other after 7 months.

                                   Rick Glazier

From: "Eric Tanenbaum" <[log in to unmask]>


> I have failed in my attempt to upgrade from Windows 2000 Professional to XP
professional because of an apparent hardware conflict. Following the 'Failed Installation
to Protect the Computer' message's advice, I disabled all cache'ing and shadowing and
ran the installation in 'safe' mode. Now the machine just freezes after the opening
Windows' logo, although it does get to the third or fourth blip in the progress monitor
window before it goes dead. There doesn't seem to be any disk activity.
>
> The CPU is an AMD Athlon XP 1600. There are 256 megabytes of memory.
The motherboard, made by MSI, features a Promise Fasttrak 100 Raid controller.
The XP installation recognises the XP driver for the RAID controller.
>
> I'd appreciate any advice about what to do next.

                         PCBUILD's List Owners:
                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>