Alright, here's my problem. My grandfather had an old Sony Vaio from years ago (probably 3-5, it was about a 1.3ghz pentium4). Well, i convinced him to get a new computer but by the building process and he purchased a new case, ram, motherboard, and CPU (AMD Athlon64 3000+ on a MSI K8MM-V motherboard bundle from CompUSA). We've installed everything fine and dandy, and the computer would bootup find everything but when it would get to what would suppose to be the Windows Boot screen, it would restart and do the process over and over again. So, i suggested that since it was a Sony Vaio computer, the hard drive might not be compatible with the new equipment (most OEM stuff isn't...) so we reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled WindowsXP, but after the boot screen finishes (the black winXP load screen with the bar....) and its supposed to go to the actual desktop...it just goes black and seems to freeze....

since that we actually zeroed out the maxtor hard drive to try to get rid of all traces of the Sony VAIO on that hard drive, but we are still running into the same problem....we can't figure it out at all...and my grandma is getting pretty pissed at this moment too btw...so any help would be GREATLY appreciated.. This problem is really bogging my mind...

So, pimps, do what you do best Help out us poor souls who can't figure it out ourselves! Thanks guys!!!

the only issue that immediately comes to mind is a video initialization error (vga) like a driver error or a hardware malfunction, if the mobo has onboard video, disable it and use an add-on card, if its not onboard, try using a diff video card, if the video card requires a power connector, make sure its plugged in, and bottom line, if nothing else resolves the issue....

take every single thing apart, and put it back together again

another important thing to mention too is that formatting a hard drive sometimes is not enough, you have to first go into the recovery console in windows setup, and at the command prompt, type FIXMBR, this will overwrite the master boot record, something many people overlook when migrating a drive from an OEM system to a homebuilt one, also eliminate the existing partition(s) and repartition the drive, then format that partition (NTFS obviously), furthermore, using LBA mode in your BIOS can sometimes increase compatability with drives that might have been used in a strict OEM system configuration (Sony, Dell, Gateway, IBM) since vendors will often configure these drives in a specific way (to contain backups of configurations, or to contain seperate recovery partitions)...

if all else fails, RMA the lot and try again, it could just be something bad...

You are using a full edition of XP right?

I've used hard drives from pre-made machines in somewhat the same way as you're describing... No problems, maybe because of how I did it, dunno. It's worth a try, right?

If you have a Win98 Startup disk handy, use that to boot up and format/partition the HDD. Once you've FDISKed and format C: /s 'ed the HDD, you should be able to reboot, selecting "Boot with CD-ROM support", and then drop in your XP CD. If that doesn't work, don't freak, just drop in the Win98 CD, install, then upgrade to XP. Once you have the XP installed, delete the Win98 backup files. Download and apply Win XP updates, and you should be good.

I did this on a buddy's machine that had caught some pretty nasty 'net bugs... I didn't *want* to know where he got them, trust me... It took us about 1 hour total time, with formatting/partitioning/Win98/WinXP/updates.
After wards, I made sure to lecture him thoroughly on the dangers of not having an antivirus prog or two, some antispyware progs, and so forth on hand to deal with nasties... Oh, yeah, and no more prOn for him, either...

Do you have a good copy of XP or are you using one that came with the VIAO?