I bought a second hand IBM pentium 3 with 256 mb and 40 gb HD for my son. When I switched it on it booted from the HD to just the win98 command prompt. (I assume that the disk had just been formatted to wipe it) I am attempting to put XP on it, formatted the drive NTFS, started the install but cannot get past the stage where it reboots and transfers operation from the install cd to the PC.

It starts to reboot, accesses the HD and then reboots again....and again....and again.

Any ideas?

More info.....just found an old win 98 disk and that loads up OK as far as the Product Key screen (which I cant find )

Does this mean that the PC is not capable of running XP??