I had a very similar problem just recently. I was playing with one of my lab PCs and re installing XP Home SP1 . The installed failed 3 times like yours. When I was looking at it this morning, I noticed the PC did not detect the hard drive as shown in POST screens on startup. Now, XP should have shown an error with no hard drive but it DID see a hard drive. I traced the no detect to the fact that for some reason, the MB bios didn't like the DVD player I had connected to that IDE channel, when I removed it, it started detecting the hard drive again. Now I would like to point out, both the hard drive and the DVD player were working on that machine, running XP before the failed install although the DVD had been added after the original install. Interesting. I'm right now, trying a reinstall of XP with the DVD player removed to see what happens. What I'm thinking may be happening is that the drive was recognized, but somehow too late for the boot process to work properly but in time for the XP setup to see it after booting from the CD. Any hardware guys wanna weigh in on this? Is it possible?