One more thing, its Hard Drive C, you might laugh at the question but what is the hard drive c? i mean what hardware is it? im pretty sure its just that box of memory in the PC but im not sure. and could it possibly be fried? because i just installed Age of Empires III(a game) on Friday, its Sunday, and the problem happened Saturday night almost most definitely, and im thinking that even though my specs were suitable for the game, maybe the game just finally fried whatever the Hard Drive. I have had the PC for like 5 years and were taking it in tomorrow so im hoping you guys could tell me some cheap solutions to the problem, if i have to replace hardwar... Thx again.

I fixed this problem by manually entering in the bios the drive parameters (cylinders/sectors etc)I found on the Western Digital web site for my WD 80gd disk. My Award Bios 4.51PG would not correctly autodetect the drive settings no matter which mode I did it in.
Or rather, it would seem to, and allow me to install XP but would not boot from it.