Currently I am putting together an AV8 motherboard with an AMD 3000 64bit processor. It has 512mb of Geil ram installed. The video card is an old ATI 3D Rage PCI II 128 mb ram.
The hard drive is an older IDE drive as well. It also has a 480 watt Thermaltake PSU.

My problem is I cannot get a system boot disk to start the WIndows installation. This is the case with either a bootable CD or bootable floppy disks. I've tried Windows XP Pro, WIndows 2000, and even a beta of Windows XP 64.
With my floppy boot disks, the installation begins. It begins with the first of the six floppies, and starts looking at the hardware. Then the screen goes black, and nothing happens after that. This is the case for Windows Xp. For 2000, it'll go thru all the boot disks then freeze up.
The board has the 1.5 revision of the BIOS on it. I can't get to a stable point to chance a BIOS flash to the very newest revision. I looked at the fixes in the newest release and it doesn't appear to have anything I need.
It was a knock down drag out fight just to get it to this point, and now I'm stuck.
I swapped different hardware and still encountered these problems. Different Ram, video card, hard drive, cables, floppy drive, cdrom and so on. I even removed the motherboard from the case to see if it was grounding out on anything and tried running it. No luck.
I then found out that Newegg will only replace the board. I was going to refund the money and go with a different brand and mainly a different chipset. I've always had stability issues with VIA stuff.
My plan now is to RMA the board, see if the next one works, if not, RMA it also and sell the next board new in the box on ebay and cut my losses.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
-Steve

Quoted: Currently I am putting together an AV8 motherboard with an AMD 3000 64bit processor. It has 512mb of Geil ram installed. The video card is an old ATI 3D Rage PCI II 128 mb ram. The hard drive is an older IDE drive as well. It also has a 480 watt Thermaltake PSU. -Steve

I'm curious as to why you are buildling a 64 bit system, then bottle necking it with a slow HDD and poor Vid card?

As for ideas - are you not booting straight from the installation CD with windows?  I've only minor problems installing with a Windows CD.

Are there any additional drivers needed to run this chipset?  I know windows will ask when installing if any additional drivers are to be installed seperately.  

Its not my system and the buyer had limited funds on hand at the moment. He'll upgrade in a short period of time.  I tried the bootable CD, same issue. I'm thinking its fried. And yes, I know about ESD when I was putting it together.
-Steve

What about installing linux on it?  If you can install linux on the system - then maybe a hardware conflict.  I know creative sound cards give me all sorts of crap when I build systems (and therefore do not use them any longer).

creative sound cards give you all kinds of crap...that's a new one to me!

You explain decently what happens with floppy boot disks, but I see no explanation of what your CD-ROM drive is doing when you try to boot to the install disks.  Doublecheck all your IDE jumper relationships first.  Do you have any other vidcard you could test booting up with?  I would suspect the PCI Rage to be the culprit of any hardware compatibility problems.  Do you have a good HD with a copy of Windows installed you can try popping in and booting to?  Need to isolate the components and test them one by one.

Thanks guys,
I was able to fix it by trying a range of different video cards in it. It was causing the hang-up. I tried reinstalling the Rage card after the windows installation, and it would freeze up and refuse to boot into Windows even in safe mode.
I should of known better when the motherboard wouldn't completely post at the beginning with that video card installed.
The Rage might have earned a ride on my pigeon thrower.
-Steve