Gateway 7330 plus winxp sp2 install = boot failure

My friend's Gateway 7330gz had a hard-drive failure so I installed new hard-drive (160GB drive), put down a copy of XP Pro, booted no problem, added all the appropriate drivers that I can find to remove the Yellow ? and ! from the device manager list, pulled down XP SP2, saved to hard-drive, ran the SP2, and it installs with no warnings/errors, and reboot.

Then goes into reboot loop.  Get the Gateway splash screen, The Win XP logo comes up and the progress bar does about 2-3 loops - then Gateway splash screen, repeat... If I F8 to the boot menu selections I can do a safeboot with networking. There is no blue screen.

current bios is 52.01.19/K52.00.07 
No system BIOS update is listed at the Gateway support site. Next video drivers - the newest drivers for the 82852 graphics chip set from Intel were installed, and that failed so went and found the newest Intel 852GME chipset drivers from Intel support site, installed, and that made no change.

Just in case DEP was an issue the boot.ini has the noexecute switch as /Noexecute=AlwaysOff

There is only XP Pro on the machine when I start - absolutely no other software package has been installed, no external devices are connected.

My plan was to lay down XP Pro, the SP2, then SP3, (updating IE along the way), and add  MS Security Essentials. Then pick up all other patches since SP3 before adding any other software. I can boot into safe mode and uninstall sp2, and the machine will boot and run - no issues.

Thoughts on why the boot failure after SP2 install? And what else to check? Or if anyone has a 7330gz with SP2 installed could you tell me what versions of the drivers you are running?

I've not had a machine be this much hassle since 1990 era systems when you had to configure irq and int by hand for each device.

re: straight to SP3

I have tried xp to sp2 to sp3 with no reboots, and that did not work.

could try xp to sp3, but I seem to recall that there was a cavaet that you had to have a minimum of SP1a installed first. MS download site for SP1a has been broken for some time so there is no help there.

also tried the uniblue driver discovery product to see if there was some other driver way out of date. That did find one USB controller driver but there was no change after that update.

I've set and looked at the bootlogs but didn't see anything that jumped out at me.

Tried the XP and then upgrade to SP3 ..got a warning that SP3 requires a minimum of SP1(a), the upgrade exited and back to bare XP  ...And Microsoft no longer has SP1a available as a download.

I've rebuilt/repaired a number of machines (HP, Toshiba, Dell, DEC, Compaq (before they bought DEC, IBM) and found that boot failure like this has turned out to be driver related (most often video) almost always. There were a handful that were bad hardware (but they would not even load the base system), dumb things like not enough disk space (not this time), hardware not supported (this laptop has the label proudly proclaiming it "designed for XP")  ...

This one has me stumped ...

I need to stay away from the linux base with xp in a vm ... I don't think the EU will be up to that challenge. But if there is a pointer on how to do that I won't mind reading up on it just in case I have to go that route.

It looks like I'll have to put xp down and not fix any of the yellow ? and ! then upgrade them one at a time trying a sp2 upgrade after each one. There may be some combo of most current drivers that just don't play together on XP sp2 but co-exist on XP? It is Gateway and it is Microsoft so anything is possible.

Any other thoughts or tools?

these two sites will get you to the MS 1.9MB file that is supposed to download only those files your need
. http://download.cnet.com/Windows-XP-Service-Pack-1a-SP1a/3000-2098_4-10147919.html

 . http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=19751

this link just redirects you to SP2 download.

. http://www.softwarepatch.com/windows/winxpsp1.html

I've not yet found a full network install of SP1a yet. So far all that's come up is the small downloader. The downloader will begin to work but when it starts to pull down the files the server won't respond. Most likely MS pulled the server down years ago because SP2 is supposed to work.

Solution Found

In the BIOS advanced set up was an option called INTEL Speed Step

Disabled the option, and rebooted into SP2 with no issues. 

Added SP3, MS Security Essentials without any other problems..