XP Home won't install

make sure bios level virus is turned off? download western digitals hard disk diagnostics and utils, give the drive a full check out following their instructions. format and partition with their utilities and try xp install again.
make sure your bios is latest greatest. try disabling onboard nic and whatever else you think you can.

Is this a SATA drive?

And, does your motherboard have both an IDE and SATA controller?

If so, and you are connecting to the on-board SATA controller, you may need to set up the drive as a single disk RAID array.

A number of motherboards with on-board SATA interfaces have the SATA connected to a RAID controller. In order to get XP to install to, and boot from the drive, you need to first set up the drive as a single drive RAID array in BIOS setup.

Also:
You need to be installing XP SP1.
If you have the original version of XP, you will need to "slip-stream" SP1 onto a custom installation CD.
(I believe Microsoft has instructions posted on how to do this.)

At one point when the XP installer is loading, there is a prompt at the bottom of the screen to press a key to load an alternate mass storage driver.
You need to press the key, and load the driver for the SATA controller you are using.

Chas

I am assuming that there was a HDD with XP installed prior to the installation of this new HDD. The WD800 has a higher failure rate than any others in the WD line. Out of the 50-60 HDDs I sold this year, the only ones that failed were WD800s. I would also verify the jumper settings were correct on the HDD itself.

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