Desperatly trying to find advice.
I had a new motherboard arriving today (after my old one died while my gf tried to push a sound card in while the computer was on).

I have connected everything nicely and all I get is that few seconds after Windows starts to boot it restarts (on few occassions I did get to see the windows logo for half a sec). While trying different tricks with booting from CD (standard win xp CD) I'm even getting blue screens. So I cannot even install a new OS!

Now, I have stripped the system down (graphic card and HDD left only) and started to boot from CD with just one HDD connected at a time (3 in total I have). When going into recovery and running chkdsk command, sooner or later I'm getting blue screen (that's to say I can run chkdsk few times with results saying no problems and then at some point the blue screen appears). This situation repeats for every HDD I have.

I had by now checked HDDs on another PC and they are all fine. From the old system I kept CPU (AMD XP 2000+), RAM (2 - one 256 MB and one 1GB - tried all the combination, running each one separately and so on but the same problems persisted) and obviously PSU. Would anyone know if those kind of things that happen with my computer could be likely to damaged any of those components and whether the symptoms my PC has could possibly be traced to be most likely any of the old components? I hope to check RAM later tomorrow but access to another PC is not easy.

Possibly could be the BIOS settings. Check if there is a SATA emulation mode, and try to change it.

Troubleshooting Windows STOP Messages

Start there to see what the Stop Code refers to.

But, it sounds like a RAM issue. When she blew the last board, it could have affected the other parts.. you said you kept that ram.
I recommend burning a boot disk (from some computer) that has Memtest86+ and test the system with the most in depth scan it will do. It will let you know which stick is bad.
With all the registers on a stick of ram, it is not unheard of (or unlikely) that the system can boot but when it finally uses that register (reads rather than write), it flips out and BSoD's.

Memtest86 - Download Page

It is either mobo, ram or cpu (well or CD/DVD), but i doubt the last. and the first should not be the issue.. but could be. the most likely cause is the RAM followed by the cpu itself. Remember, the surge caused by inserting a card in a live system would go straight up the bus into what? the cpu.

However, the RAM is the easiest to test. Rule it out, or confirm its issues. If you rule it out, you are looking at the CPU.

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New PC :
New: Phenom 9500 Quad 2.2, 4gb ram XP Pro 64-bit (Sata 0), XP Pro 32 bit (sata 1), 40 eide HDD (music), Pioneer Blu-Ray Burner, HP Multidisk CD-RW/DVD-Rom, 2x250 Seagate HDD's, ATI Radeon 3870, Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe WiFi-AP

Old PC:
P4 1.5GHz, 768 Ram, hda-80Gb (80Ubuntu), DVD R/RW

Try to test it in safe mode.

Hi, is this the exact same model and revison of motherboard as the last ?

If not, and if you did not format the old hard drive, it's still running the drivers from your old board. This would result in bsod in most instances.

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This is most likely a RAM problem. Try taking out one RAM stick and booting up with one. Because even though you have one good RAM stick, these issues can be brought up by having a bad stick of RAM. So essentially, even if you have one good one, and one of them is bad and its plugged in.. it will be screwing up everything. Give it a shot and reply back if you need more help.

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Laptop: Dell Studio 15; 3GB RAM; 250GB HDD; ATI Mobility Radeon 3560HD(256MB RAM);Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 (2.2Ghz/800Mhz FSB/2MB Cache)