This is great information on how to troubleshoot a failed installation of Windows XP. This article should answer some of the questions that you may have in the process of troubleshooting a failed install. Follow the steps as described, and you should be able to have your system up and running.
“Remove everything that is installed or connected to your computer so the only things remaining in the case are:

Motherboard, processor, and cooling fan
Graphics card
One stick of RAM
One hard drive
One CD ROM drive

That’s it. No sound card, no network interface card, no modem, no extra hard drives or CD-Rom drives. Especially important is not to have more than one memory stick, and it should be a minimum of 128MB. Connect up the monitor, the keyboard and the mouse and power up the machine. Go into the BIOS settings and look for a setting for the basic BIOS default configuration. Select it, then make sure that if you’re booting from a CD ROM that the CD drive is the first boot device.

Reboot and let the installation process begin. I haven’t kept track of numbers, but in the vast majority of cases the installation was completed with no problem. Once you have the basic operating system in place it’s a simple matter to start adding back in the extra memory, drives, and devices that were stripped out initially.”

More info here.

Good luck !

Tags: troubleshooting, windows xp, bare, bones, install, motherboard, processor, ram, hard drive, cd-rom