Hi machan,
There are lots of ways to handle this. Try these:
1. Remove the hard disk and attach it to an available IDE port in a working machine.
2. Fully format and do a thorough surface scanning on the disk
3. If it finds surface errors, there is a chance that these will be an indication of impending hardware failure. This means that most probably your hard disk is not gonna survive for long. If you are desperate to install xp, then do the following.
4. You will need to find the manufacturer of the hard disk, go to their site or do a google search and then find a low level formatting tool. Follow their instructions on how to do this.
5. Then once complete, again to surface scanning to see if any improvement is there.
6. If not, you will need to find a tool on the net that will show the map of bad sectors (I don’t know of an exact tool, you will need to find).
7. Find the areas of bad sectors and cordon them with an isolated partition. Partitiion magic should do this.
8. Then keep a partition that is free of bad sectors.
9. Format this with NTFS file system and you will be able to install xp to this.
10. In the meantime, collect some money to buy a new hard disk.
