HIMEM and SETVER should load fine on a fresh install, so there is still something wrong here. CHKDSK errors may be caused by incompatibility of you CF card with the XT-IDE: do you have other CF cards of different make or capacity that you can use? Also, you can add a /V switch after HIMEM.SYS in you config.sys, and see if you can get some messages on what himem is doing before the system hangs