Dear Pan,
I am having exaclty the same problem with few exceptions that I believe
are worth mentioning in order to understand what's happening here.
1. I am using Utlimate Boot CD, which is a live CD like knoppix, but
is based entirely on Windows. With that everything works fine,
including all diagnostics, benchmarks etc... for HD, CPU, Memory,
etc...
2. My computer has been running with the exact same configuration for
about 2 years. Yestarday I experienced a crash during the
reinstallation of Visual Studio and Win XP went in the tipical loop
indicating that you need to repair windows. I decided to take the
opportunity of reinstalling it from scratch, to do a clean up my
computeing environment. When I restarted with the WIndows XP CD I went
through the problem you described (I had formatted the partition
before).
3. I have also tried to cache the installation CD locally, so that the
actual setup is executed from the HD itself, avodinig any possible
problem with communication with the CD drive. No way.
I tend to believe that the problem is in the Motherboard that becomes
defective, because the problem started out of the blue yesterday.
However I would like to test few things more:
1. Restoring an image based backup and see if it works (that would rule
out the hardware problem)
2. Delete all partitions on the HD and recreate it (my disk is 160Gb
and the OS partition was just the first 30Gb, I am trying to save the
second partition with my data...). That would indicate that WIndows XP
setup had problems with the MBR of a disk with that layout.
I'll keep posting should I discover anything new.
Fabrizio