Please tell me someone has figured out the root of this issue. I am having the EXACT same problem, except I did not have linux installed. I just built a new system with the evga 680i reference board and a whenever I go to boot from cd the same exact thing happens. It gives me the "Setup is configuring your system etc, etc" line and then goes blank. Optical drive stops about 15 seconds later and nothing happens ever again after that. Im wondering if it has to do with my hard drive, Im currently using a sata wd 5000ys...anyone know anything more about this issue at all?

What kind of Windows Disc are you using? I really wish I knew what happend to get mine to work but I just don't understand it myself. Jmke was talking about faulty boot handler. I don't know how one would go about diagnosing/solving that problem.

Just an regular xp professional cd, nothing special or custom aside from there being no SP2 on it...this is killing me. I have an evga 8800gtx, 4gb of memory, and a c2d i plan to overclock and I can do @#$@$ @#$@$ with it!!! Ugh...Ive been trolling the internet for hours and hours on this yet this post on this forum is the closest Ive seen anyone come to mimicking my issue. I wonder if my hard drive just died, even though it is a brand new enterprise drive (YS) from western digital with the 5 yr warranty. I took thurs-mon off to have fun with the new setup but it looks like ill be waiting for an rma from newegg during this time, what a waste. I really have no idea what it could be, tried disconnecting, reconnecting, even immasculating and nothing worked...Im about to start praying to xrnu or something...I wondering if flashing the bios would work...what else can i do? Since I cant narrow it down then how am i to figure out what, if anything, needs to be rma'd? For the $3500 I spent on this comletely new setup I almost expect it to know I want XP installed and to have had it done upon first boot :)

Please, if anyone even knows a friend of a friend of a friend who dated someone who might have even the tiniest clue about whats going on here please forward this topic to them. I can't imagine there's only like 5 people in the world who might have encountered this. I see alot of info online about black screens but they are always post-inital info screen and happen at some point during installation...

Do you have another computer? Or are you typing from some other internet source. Cause if you did have another computer you could try switching out certain parts (starting with hard drive) to see which ones are causing the problem.

I am typing from another computer. I thought I figured it all out at 3 am last night (Im at work now, Ive had 10 hours of sleep since sunday, ugh) and here's what I did:

Since sata II hard drives are hot swappable I figured Id just disconnect the drive only and leave everything else plugged in (kind of a reverse diagnosis) to see if it would go past the blank screen. It did! I then plugged it back in once setup paused to have me make a selection. Unfortunately, setup only was able to see 100 GB out of 500 so I figured I was having the sata issue common with the evga 680i board. So I exited setup, rebooted, did the same thing as above but pressed F6 to install 3rd party drivers that I was able obtain on a floppy. Once prompted to format, setup did recognize the drive as being about 500 GB so I was all pumped up. I did a full, not short, format to cover all the bases and this took FOREVER. I was all excited yet once formatting ended I got an error message along the lines of "There was a problem with the device and setup was unable to configure the drive correctly. Setup cannot continue any further" or something along those lines, it was soooo late by then and I was on no sleep even then. So now I only have to assume that the drive is bad, maybe the mbr is corrupted, etc and I have no choice but to RMA the damn thing. I only have one other hard drive on my other computer so I cant test it out on that since Id lose everything via formatting. So at least I know it is related to the hard drive. Its probably 90% probability that the drive is screwed up and 10% probability that ALL the motherboards sata controllers are defective. Does anyone agree with this analysis or could I be missing something? Thanks!

I don't know if what you say is true about the hard drive failure. Your saying that you disconnected the hard drive while booting from the disc and reconnected it once inside the windows format prompt, and then you recieved an error after formating and installing and trying to load into windows. Right? Well I did the same thing. I disconnected the hard drive and loaded up windows, I then reconneted the hard drive, formated and installed Windows x64 on it, which resulted in the exact same "Setup cannot continue any further" IRRC. I then rebooted with the x86 version of windows XP and it seemed to work (hard drive plugged in all the way) and it installed jut fine. Now IRRC that is how it happend (I forget very easily), and like I said I still don't know exactly how I got it to work.