WinXP Pro Installation Freezes

[Bastard-X]

(Did search and checked sticky thread, couldn't find answers.)
When I get to the GUI part of XP installation with the "windows is so good" comments on the screen the computer always freezes when there's 34 minutes left to go. I've tried around 20-30 times and it always freezes at the same spot.

Right now all the PCI slots are empty, the only card I have is the Radeon in the AGP slot. I'm using onboard AC97 sound for now I've tried booting with and without it. Default bios settings won't work and I've tried changing a lot of things in the bios and taking booting up with just one stick of ram and it still won't work. It always freezes when there's 34 minutes left. I tried formatting the hard drive again, changing IDE slot configurations, and running with just one stick of ram. Nothing works. I'm not overclocking.

Would it possibly work if I installed Win2000 then installed XP over it and if that didn't work then I'd know I probably had a bad piece of hardware?

Please help!

[andyms18a]

try a partition of about 10gb as your c drive if this dose not work
copy the winxp cd to your hdd and run setup from that if this fails
then you may have a damaged winxp cd

[reboot]

I would try copying the windows CD to the hard drive, then install from there first.
If it still fails, can you swap out the video card for any other?
Install windows with even any old PCI card, then install the Radeon later.

[BastardX]

I'm going to try a different gfx card but I don't think it's supported by xp.. worth a try though.

Btw this is the first computer I've built and I don't know to copy the cd to the hdd as the OS isn't completely installed... how do I do that?

Thanks.

[andyms18a]

boot from win98 boot disk with cd support and at the a prompt
A:/ TYPE THIS COPY D:\*.* C:\ AND HIT ENTER note REPLACE D:
with the drive leter of your cd drive as reported by dos also the hdd must be fat32 NOT ntfs. you can convert to ntfs file sys after winxp is fully instaled