All,

I had a very similar experience with nVidia RAID software.  I was using a Gigabyte Motherboard, I believe that some of the eMachines use the same Motherboard or a similar board.

The problem you are having is related to "when" the driver is being applied and/or if it's a text based driver or a PnP driver.

What is happening is the driver you downloaded from nVidia is PnP.  The system is trying to load a text based driver upon boot and then applying the PnP driver afterward.

I spent 7 days downloading drivers and banging my head against a wall on this one. Below are a few solutions. These worked for me, but may not work for you:

For both methods, In the BIOS, make sure nVidia's onboard RAID is off.  You can even turn off nVidia SATA functionality(SATA will still work, the Motherboard manufacturer isn't the greatest at explaining this).

1. Download Intel's most current ACHI/SATA driver, integrate it into your XP CD.  This should give you all the text based driver support you need to load XP.  Once XP is loaded THEN run the nVidia software.

2. Make an image of an existing XP installation/VM with the nVidia software loaded, using SYSPREP for XP and the Windows 7 image tools(imageX, diskpart, windows 7 usb bootable install).  Push the image to the system, using diskpart and imagex, the system should load, freak out, then find the PnP drivers and settle down.

I have tested both of these methods, they work for what I do with Gigabyte Motherboards, hopefully this helps you!

-Randy