OK, I just recently built an athlon sys too. Obviously you're computer is trying to boot, so that's good.
But first off: Go back through your owners manual you got with your motherboard and verify that all of your jumpers are correct for your sys. In this case, the defaults or "jumper free/auto detect" options would be best. Next, make sure that if you've connected both your HD and CDRW on the same IDE controller, that you've plugged the primary drive (HD) into the top plug (should be black)on the ribbon cable, and the slave drive (CDRW)into the second (grey)or middle plug. Also be sure that you've set the jumpers on the back of the drives accordingly. These steps insure that your drives aren't conflicting. If you're using seperate IDE controllers, make sure that your HD has use of the primary.
NEXT: Using your OTHER computer, go to your control panel, click on add/remove programs, then click the "create start disk" tab. Insert a blank floppy disk into your drive and make a boot disk. After this is done. Use this disk to boot your NEW computer. Select option 1 to start your computer with cd rom support. [Note: boot disk will create a temporary "RAM DRIVE" where it will store some utilities. this changes your CDROM drive by one letter. (More on this later)].
NOW: After you arrive at the DOS prompt type FDISK (FixDisk, a partitioning utility used in DOS). Make as many partitions as you want. Keep in mind these will have to be formatted later. You can creat either FAT16 or FAT32 (File Allocation Table) partitions. I strongly recommend FAT32, unless you are going to be using some
really old software.
OK,:Now you need to format your drive partitions, once you're finished with that, (assuming all has gone well so far), you should be ready to install your OS from your CDROM. Remember what was said above about the RAMDRIVE. It will relocate your CDROM one more letter. So if you have 4 HD partitions, C,D,E,F, G: would NOT be the CDROM, the bootdisk has made that the RAMDRIVE, where it is temporarily storing "whatever" utilities, could be the recipie for jello, who cares, and H: will be the CDROM. SO, now go find your CDROM, whatever letter it may be and then type in Setup. You'll see Scandisk perform a system check, after it's done, click exit and your computer should begin installing windows, and the rest is history.
Hope this helps, at least that was the way it worked for my system...


