No Boot - No New Install

Hi, Hopefully someone out here can shed some light on this for me.
It is not a urgent problem that has to be solved, rather to serve my satisfaction to resolve the riddle.
I have 3 Pentium III 1000 KHz Slot 370 IBM NetVista PC’s all with the same Motherboards MSI Lite and the same configurations. I run one myself as a spare machine with a 80 Gig HD and 256 MB of SD Ram and it performs very well. I have given one to a friend of mine with 128 MB on board and told him to upgrade to 256 and stick a HD in as his PC is only a Celeron PII. 660.
He has brought it back to me not working. He has left it at 128 MB of Ram and a 10 Gig HD and set up his HP Multi Function Printer Scanner Fax machine.
Upon installing his Multi F. he received the message "Not enough memory" so he could not install it. But now the PC will not boot at all XP Pro the black screen with the boot options comes up Windows did not close down properly do you want to boot with the various options to boot nighter option works it just came back to the same thing every time, so I decided to re-install new, inserted the XP CD Formatted the drive and started to reinstall clean all goes well till the first reboot before the Windows bit starts, after the reboot it goes back to do you want to boot from the CD if you go for it, it will perform the whole procedure over and over it will not go past the re-boot. If I connect that same HD into one of the other identical IBM’s it will happily continue to install Windows XP Pro and run ok. But if I put that same HD back into his PC it will not boot up it offers me a system restore and when going along with it again at the reboot that is as far as it will go and again will go merry go round.
I know the HD is ok although small but ok I did a disk check on it on a different PC and as I sed it works in my PC. I had taken the memory stick out and changed it in one of my PC’s and it works fine swapped the cables all ok too changed the CD Rom all back to the exact point no change. I connected one of my spare 40Gig HD with a working version of Windows 2000Pro on it that will work on my other 2 IBM’s I can swap the drive between them and it will work fine, but not on that one it wants to do a Restore as well. Sorry to be a bit long winded here but I was trying to give you a picture as close as possible.
I would like to find out what the cause of this behaviour is for my own satisfaction, so I know if I should ever come across that again.
thank you for reading it
hawk22

 

Hi Tony, thanks but how do you explain that a identical PC continued that very XP install from the point that the other PC stopped (reboot) the 2 other IBM NetVistas run that HD with XP Pro but not the other it want's to do a system restore. To be honest I can't remember what Format I did.
hawk22

 

Assuming identical motherboards, that indicates a hardware problem, most likely on the MoBo. Check the BIOS for any unusual settings, and/or try setting it to defaults. If this doesn't work a new motherboard may be indicated.

 

Quick check - BIOS Anti Virus should be disabled for Windows to load properly.