Cheapo Nogo with XP

I bought this really cheap wintergreen desktop pc loaded with linspire. Now, no matter what I do, even with a full, new, ntfs, xp pro install. It won’t boot to xp. It will allow me to reinstall linspire and boot fine.. but not with xp. Failure to load os! Checked the bios, changed harddrives, tried without cd rom, nothing helps. Any suggestions out there? THe motherboard book says it’s created for xp… Frustrated.
Cindy