windows xp reinstall

@phazeon,

The best way to start a new install if any OS disk is giving you the middle finger....is to low level format the hard drive. In other words, wipe that sucker clean of all information, partitions, MBR (master boot record)...and set the drive to a "just out of the box" state.

You can do this one of two ways.

Get the drive's diagnostic CD from the manufacturer's site. If you don't have a floppy disk, that's fine...the image comes in ISO form to create a bootable CD. Boot the system with that CD, and find in the selections to do a low level format.

Here is a link for other "scrubbing" software. Drive Scrubber being my favorite, but that's a shareware title. There are some free ones listed.

After the drive is completely scrubbed, the XP setup CD will tell you some sob story about it being a "new" drive because there's nothing on it...after which you can proceed with the installation.

Good luck.

 

thanks for everyones help as of now the porblem has been solved. There was no problem with the hardrive it is infact a problem with the cd-rom or the motherboard. I reformated the drive by hooking it up to another computer. My next step in making sure it all works well is to reset the bios settings on the board by resetting the jumper on the board. Hopefully there are no other bugs now.