What a great community you all have here! Can't believe it took me this long to find it =). I don't normally ask for help and I appreciate everyone's help in this matter.

I am building a new box and am having a horrid time installing XP Pro w/ SP2. I realize I am asking a software (OS really) question in a hardware forum but can't shake the feeling something is going on between the mobo and Sata II drives.

My stripped down rig is:

ASUS A8N SLi Premium
AMD X2 4200+
Corsair 1GB x2 Twinx 2048-3200c2
80GB Hitachi SATA II HDD
x2 250GB Hitachi SATA II HDD in RAID 0 (getting same reults when these are removed)
Gigabyte nVidia 6600 GT
NEC DVD burner
Seasonic S12-500 500w PSU

All non-essential hardware has been removed/disconnected.

The problem I am having is that the install takes up to 3 hours for "Setup is copying files" to reach 51% and then freezes. I actually got an install to finish copying all the files this morning but it took 4 1/2 hours and is still installing Windows 6 1/2 hours later .

During various attempts I have disabled/enabled one or both RAID controllers in the hope of getting the install to move along. I have made and used the infamous "F6" disk required for the SATA drives/RAID during the XP install. I have also downloaded and used the latest updates for the diskette with no success. The BIOS and XP both see the standalone drive and RAID array. I have also used the default setting for the RAM in BIOS as well as the correct settings.

Please help... thanks =)

Blake

This is a shot in the dark, but is it possible that the problem is in reading the WinXP CD (either the CD itself, or the reader)

Just a guess...

last time i ever had a problem like that it was a bad stick of memory.....you might check into this.

I'm going to second Covered_in_bees's opinion.
Sounds like an issue w/ your DVD-ROM drive or something. Can you swap out the drive?

You could try downloaded knoppix or something on a standalone CD drive. That'll load an OS into your RAM (I don't think it uses that much HDD if at all), so that might be a good test to see if its your CD drive or HDDs.

Thanks for the responses... currently in hour 7 of this install and it looks like it might actually finish sometime today 8O . I have tested the RAM but will do it again just in case. A friend of mine also thought it might be the DVD-ROM so I will look into it after the install finishes lol.

Thanks again everyone.

Another thing I just thought of is that your BIOS might not recognize the DVDROM drive correctly... Or at least at the wrong speed. You might wanna check. It might be thinking its a 2x CDROM drive!!!