POST stops at boot device

I bought a used Gigabtye mobo at a retailer to upgrade my pc. I took my daughters new HD and, with some used parts, put a basic machine together to format and reload. Worked fine. I then took everything off the old board and have begun placing them in the new board (one by one).
I put on a new LGA775 fan, 1 stick of PC3200 DDR ram, an LG dvd/rw and a 40gb Maxtor hdd. Mobo has on board audio and video. Front panel is hooked to board.
On boot, it POST's till the IRQ setting. If the BIOS is set to boot from the dvd first, the dvd lights up but won't load the files and goes to a blank screen. If it's set to boot from the HD first it gets to the IRQ settings and then I get a flashing cursor at bottom left.
I have checked and rechecked the BIOS setting and all seems correct. Doing something wrong obviously.... what?

Have you tried resetting the BIOS to Factory Defaults?

Which model Gigabyte?

No, will try it.

GA-8VM800M-775

Tried default settings.

When "Starting windows" got BSOD Stop: c0000221 Unknown Hard Error \Systemroot\System32\ntdll.dll

Put daughters HD back into machine and boots fine.

The reason would be because daughter's computer does not have the exact same hardware.

When you install Windows, the installation routine installs what's necessary for the hardware it recognizes that is currently in, and attached to, your computer. Therefore, (as you have found out), if you then remove the hard drive and attempt to install it in another, different computer, more than likely, Windows will fail to load correctly, (if at all).

Might want to try a "Repair" install of the OS.

So you're saying that my original plan of taking the drive out of my old machine and putting into a newer bare bones machine and working up from there is a non starter. Damn... I could have sworn I'd heard about it done before.

So I'm going to need use the OS disk I used for that drive to load it onto the other machine? Just install it using the last loading option.

You didn't mention what OS you're using. I don't understand what you mean by "using the last loading option". If your OS is XP here's how to do a Repair install.

Boot up with the XP CD in the drive and let Setup run. Go past the "C" and "R" repair options by pressing Enter just as if you're doing a clean install and you'll eventually get an option to "Repair an existing installation". That's the one you want. If it asks about formatting you've gone wrong, so start over.

You'll get to keep your existing apps & settings, but you need to re-install SP2, Windows Updates & any unsigned drivers afterwards. NOTE: Be aware that you'll lose any protection from Blaster / Sasser type worms. Don't go online without a firewall, whether the built in Windows one or 3rd party.

sorry dneilson, didn't see your first post in there.

"leaving the current file system intact" I believe it says, or something along that line. Rather than quick formatting and losing all.

OK, so the repair feature instead... gotcha.

Thanks much.