Make sure your jumper on the HDD is set correctly. For example, with a WD
HDD, you would have no jumper or put the jumper on "neutral" if it is the
only drive hooked to the computer.

I did make that mistake a few times, but the drive won't get detected at all
if the jumpers are wrong. BTW, I'm also putting the master at the end of
the cable.

With FDISK, you can delete the NTFS partitions by selecting "delete
non-DOS
partition" in the FDISK menu. Be sure to read through all of the menu
options under FDISK, that may help solve your problem.

I tried that. The drive had a primary and extended partition, with two
logical drives in the extended. FDISK said there were no logicals in the
extended but wouldn't let me remove it because the were there! (???)

I have since wiped the drive and installed a 8.64 GB (whatever the DOS max
is with a 98 SE boot disk) FAT32 active primary partition but it didn't
help. I could boot from it, but only in DOS, and I couldn't install XP on
it. The only difference was that the STOP error involved SETUPDD.SYS and
not NTFS.SYS.

is corrupt, or contains conflicting information (did you try using the HDD
manufacturer's installation floppy?).

Yes, I did!! It wasn't on the list of drives I could work on and it
couldn't get a response from the drive:

BIOS Extension Support - Failed
Partition Information - Read Failed

Again, this drive appears to be working fine with my A7A266, at least I can
install and run Windows XP from it. It is possible that there are minor
defects in the drive because I sometimes got systen freezes or sudden
reboots, but I had attributed these to weaknesses in the ALi MaGiK chipset
and/or my ATI Rage Pro video chip.

hing to try is erasing the Master Boot Record. To do this, use the
undocumented command "FDISK /MBR". Keep in mind that this will likely
erase
any partition information, meaning you'll lose all partitions on the HDD.
It is a quick and dirty option for getting up and running, though.

I did work on the Master Boot Record from the Windows XP CD, but the changes
did not appear to stick. I also wonder why I had to do this with the
A7N8X-DX but not the A7A266!

The longer option is to write zeroes to the drive using the HDD
manufacturer's installation/diagnostic tools disk. This will take a
while,
but it's the best way to ensure that you've a clean HDD with no MBR or
partition info of any kind left to corrupt the disk (make sure your
floppies
don't contain a MBR virus, btw). Once you have written zeroes to the HDD,
you have two options:

Again, the Maxtor CD could not detect the drive, and it shouldn't be
necessary to do all this just because I change motherboards.

1) install WinXP from a boot CD.... the installation process will format
your HDD for you (NTFS preferred).

Then I will get the same old STOP error!