Originally Posted By: mlord
Okay.. no probo.. driver disks.. on floppy. Tried those, still fails.

Odd. That should work. I guess you can't "slipstream" SP3 into the install media as you need a working Windows install for that...

Originally Posted By: mlord
Next ? maybe I'll reassemble an ancient mobo and do the install there, and then just move the drive to the new one afterward.

Windows isn't Linux unfortunately and it will be deeply unhappy with you if you do this even before all the online activation crap.