righteo folks. brand new Foxconn motherboard with 3700+ AMD processor. 1 SATA HDD (an old one, with windows xp and tonnes of data on it. still functional), 1 DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, 1 floppy disk drive. Thats it.
go to start up windows and i get the old STOP: 0x0000007B message as soon as the windows flag progress bar things starts. its pretty much an instant transistion.  
i looked up the error message and it says that its because it doesnt have the HDD/ SATA driver installed. so i create one of those snazzy little floppy disks that you can make with the CD that CAME with the m/board and it doesnt boot from it, so i presumed that i have to re-install windows and press F6 when its setting up to install the 3rd party RAID/SCSI driver. i place the floppy into the drive and vóila! it sees it and i have to select both items:
NVIDA RAID CLASS DRIVER (required)
NVIDA nForce STORAGE CONTROLLER (required)
then i press enter, and the loading sequence continues.
it then comes to the screen that asks if i want to install or repair windows. so i press enter to set it up, and this is where it gets confusing.
sometimes it just restarts the computer as if nothing happend, twice it got to the agreement screen and then restarts after that, and this time its on the 'please wait...' screen, and has been for a good few minutes.
its a real head blag, surely this cant be good for my karma...you think i might need a new HDD?  
theres a thing, im not sure i set up the HDD properly earlier, it wanted to know if i wanted to set it up in Mirroring, stripe etc and i wasnt sure on what to choose, and mirroring didnt work, so i TRIED stripe because that did, and now i dont know how to get back to that screen. you think that'll effect this...puzzle?
 
any help would be much appreciated as it cost me enough to get this far and i need to use my computer fairly urgently to get my work off.
does anyone else hate computers when they pull stunts like this?!
regards,
Luke

ps, i posted this in the 'Windows' section, but decided it would be more suiting here. so sorry for multi-posting.I was just about to say double post.
Not sure where it's more appropriate.And all of this is related to your other issues, no doubt. I am going to lock this thread and we can pursue this issue in the other IDENTICAL posting.

Really, only one is needed.