Thanks for your suggestions so far everyone. I've tried swapping in and out both sets of ram, I've checked ram timings, tried a great many jumper combinations, including cable select, and after the first part of installation of windows xp I tried fixmbr and fixboot again, but to no avail.
When I try to install xp on the 80gb hard drive, the only drives attached are the 80gb drive and the cd/dvd drive. I'm trying to keep hardware to a minimum until I have a working windows installation on the 80gb hard drive.
As an experiment, I did the first installation part of the installation (formatting and copying of files) on the 80gb hard drive. I then plugged in the 3.1gb drive into the master position so its boot loader would take over, and moved the 80gb drive to a secondary position. The boot loader detected the installation of windows xp on the 80gb hard drive and immediately chose it because its installation wasn't done.
I had a black screen for about 20-30 seconds, and then an error message came up telling me hal.dll was missing or corrupt in the folder <windows root>/system32/ . For the fun of it, I'm thinking about finding and copying that file over to the system32 folder just to see what would happen.
Thanks for the suggestions everyone, I really appreciate everyones help and suggestions so far
