I guess we're talking about hardware then.

Or the disk is bad.

Are your drives (Hard & CD) recognised in the BIOS POST?

Any idea if you have a problem with either drive?

Did you try to format the disk and then do an install - or are you trying not to do that?

IMBACK! yes I fixed it, I used a different version of xp so im on xphome now and I combined my other pc but need a new motherboard cos this one doesnt fit 2 processors. thanks for the advice anyway. god this pc is so fast now One more thing though I have the other hard drive in the pc how do I get in the useraccount folders that were on it, it says access denied.

Perhaps this will help:

How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP