>I have a couple XP Pro disks. I have tried to reinstall a number of times using both disks onto different boxes. What happens is I get to the part where I'm supposed to press F8 to confirm to the agreement, and nothing happens. Nada. If I hit other keys - just for kicks - I get a blue screen with errors. I can't recall now what it was, but it basically meant I was toast and had to hard boot to get out. I have used both these OS disks in the past successfully, and even on one of the boxes that it fails on now. Any ideas?

Googling the text of the BSOD should get you the answer. If you get a lot of hits you can narrow it down with one or more of the error codes that are returned as well e.g. 0x000000cd

One wild guess - IIRC early versions of XP Pro didn't come with SATA drivers. So, if you are installing to an SATA hard drive, you need to download the appropriate driver to a floppy disk, and during the XP Setup CD boot press F6 when prompted to load that driver:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314859

Also, IIRC there can be issues installing early versions of XP on disks larger than 137GB:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013

One workaround for this latter issue is to create the system partition to be less than 137GB and install XP on that, then create another partition (e.g. E:) using the remainder of the drive.