In attempting to debug a problem I've stripped down my PC and re-installed XP
with the intend of adding back components until I can find the cause of my
problem. My bare system is:
Gigabyte GA7 VAX motherboard (bios version F12/13)
AMD Athalon XP 3000+
512Kb Corsair RAM (184pin DIMM PC3200 non-parity CL2.5)
Pioneer DVD ROM (DVD-105)
Maxtor HD (6Y160P0)
ABit Siluro FX5600 (NVidia)
PS2 Mouse + keyboard

I disable the onboard sound and USB 1.1/2.0 in the BIOS before installing
XP. The HD is partitioned into a 'Windows' partition of 20GB and the rest
into a second partition. When I install XP (Home edition with SP1a) on the
first partition (labeled C: and slow formatted to NTFS) I get an error when
installing devices:

Could not install device
System
The data is invalid

Selecting 'Finish' causes a repeat message to appear but seleting the same
again enables the install to complete. The first time this happened when
windows tried to start I got the message:

One of the files containing the systems registry data had to be recovered by
use of a log or alternate copy. The recovery was sucessful.

After selecting 'OK' the machine hung before startup completed. I tried
again in exactly the same way and all went exactly the same until the final
startup which was sucessfull (at least in as much as Windows started
sucessfully). There are two devices highlighted in device manager; one is my
graphics card which is not reconised (because the relevent drivers aren't yet
installed) and there is alo an 'unknown device' in 'sound, video and game
controllers' along with the usual default drivers and codecs. I also appeare
to have the XP wallpaper but with the 'classic' coulours for the taskbar and
windows.

Does anyone have any ideas of what may have gone wrong, if indeed anything
has?

Thanks for any light you can shed on this.