Compaq had win98 install XPpro

I have an older compaq that I tried to install XPpro on. I wanted to do a clean install and not and upgrade. I guess I made a big mistake. It was moving along fine when it said that it needed to reboot and did the count down. At this point it tried to reboot and wasn’t able to then asked if I wanted to boot off of the cd so I proceeded with this. Then the whole process starts over again and again. It is stuck in some kind of loop. It has enough ram and disk space especially since the HD was formatted using fat32. Any help would be appreciated. I really hate to just piece it out it was supposed to be for my daughter.