Hello everyone. this is my first post on this board. my topic may not exactly fit the description here, but i think its close, and quite frankly i am desperate.

I was trying to do an upgrade on a system whose
hardware seemed to pass muster. its a 98 SE Pentium 3, 933 from dell. should be fine.
This is what happened.

Popped in the disk in the cd rom. Blue windows xp install screen came up,
I
ran the analyzer...then went to install xp.
The xp screen was there, telling me all the neat little features and how
much time was left...then it did its first reboot.
It tells me I am entering windows setup. (little white status bar scrolls
across the screen, just like it does on a windows 2000 startup)
Then it comes to a black screen. It says Windows XP in the middle of it.
and
it has a very small status bar that has a few dots moving across it, left
to
right...they only make one or two passes and stop in the middle...then I
wait......and wait......and wait....

I cannot tell if its doing the install or not. Cd does not seem to run,
hard
drive does not really seem to get accessed.

However, after my last attempt (I tried 3 times because I thought maybe
its
locking up) which I let it run for the longest amount of time at that
screen, 15 mins, when I rebooted the system and went back into 98 it told
me
it was updating setup files...so I figure it must have done something,
but
was not convinced it was making any progress at the time. (and at 11 pm, I
wasnt going to wait for an hour to find out). Please advise