Alright so i just went out and bought a brand new 500Gb HD. i tried to install windows xp on it and about halfway through it said it failed to compy one of the files, so i stoped the instalation and figuredid just format the HD and start over. well... after i put it in as a slave drive and formatted it the windows disk wouldnt boot up, it would say something like "setup is configure your settings" idk, and the it would just go to a black sreen untill i reset it. i let it sit to be sure it just wasnt slow. so i googled it and came across DBAN. i booted that up and let it run for 14 hours! after that was finaly done, i tried to boot up from the windows xp disk again, this time it booted up, i went through and everything went well and then it restared and it was supposed to continue to setup windows, but instead it says "Boot disk read error, press ctrl alt del to restart... i have no idea what else to do. ive been searching for days... its not the IDE cable or anything because im on my old HD now, it has to be that HD but i dont think i can return it because i think that if the instalation wouldnt have messed up the first time it would have wroked fine, but im guessing i somehow screwed it up. im honestly out of ideas and cant find anything anywhere. im gunna try running DBAN again *sigh* and try to install windows vista on it this time instead of XP, but i doubt itll work. any help would be amazing.
If you have a spare cdrom/dvdrom, try installing windows using that drive. It's rare for a hard drive work being recognize as a slave drive but won't work when you try to install windows. You can do a scandisk/chkdsk on that new drive to see if it shows any errors. If you have your IDE's as cable select, change that so that one is master the other slave.
