XP Restarts/Install Impossible

Hello everyone. I am having problems and I found this site through a Google search, and it looks helpful.

Unfortunately, I am having tons of problems with my new rig. Base specs first:

Intel Q6600 (stock cooler)
Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6 Rev 1.0
Crucial DDR2 1066 2x1GB
PC Power & Cooling 750w Silencer
Sapphire 2900XT
Samsung 2x 500GB (RAID0)
Memorex 4x Optical Drive (DVD Recorder/DVD-ROM/CD-RW/CD-ROM)

This rig has given me nothing but headaches since I first started to power it up. Initially the fans were twitching and there was no activity. I sent the MoBo back. New MoBo, a little better, but still dead. PSU was faulty. Got activity, but the display was full of errors. GPU is faulty, I'm still working with ATI on this. Now I've decided to run a spare video card and install Windows until I get a working 2900. Now, I get into the installation, but as soon as the XP logo and progress bar comes one the screen, the system restarts. I've been trying to identify any problems within the BIOS, loose connectors etc. Is this too generic a problem?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

Whenever you have a situation where you have possible multiple failures or you don't know which part is failing, your only approach is to isolate until you can differentiate between the working parts and the failing ones.

Unfortunately, this requires that you have enough spare parts on hand to do this. Forget about loading Windows for a while. You simply need to determine if you can get your hardware to POST successfully. This means you start with a stripped down hardware config and using as many known-working parts (like your spare video card) as possible.

The first thing I'd probably do is simply to boot with PSU, CPU, RAM and video card with a bootable Memtest86 CD in a connected CD-Rom drive. And see what happens. If you can't get that far, you've got some hardware issues and need to start substituting known-working parts. Does your mainboard have a POST code LED?