windows xp installation

[diemerg]

My friend acquired an old dell and recently purchased a new WesternDigital 320 EIDE HD to replace his older 40gb. The first windows installation went well with a home edition of windows XP version until it came time for the product key and i noticed he had Professional product key only. upon reboot it gave him "disk read error ctrl+alt+delete to restart". did that, put my OEM XP boot disk in and it goes as far as "getting system requirements" and it just black screen freezes. figured maybe the original WIN installation was corrupt. took the new HD to my house and formatted it again. HD read fine in my computer. the windows disks (both of them that have been tried in his pute) read fine in my computer also. so, no bad HD, no bad WIN disks. so with a clean HD the exact same thing continues to happen. i even went as far as taking my CD drive out of my computer and installing it into his computer, just in case the drive had failed in between the days of usage. same issue. I'm not sure exactly what is going on here. any insight into this would be mucho appreciated..

 

[RebateMonger]

Bad memory
Bad HD or CD data cable or power cable
Bad drive controller

 

[diemerg]

the computer was functional with the older HD. nothing was changed other than the HD itself. still using all the old connections. i suppose anything is possible.. HD controllers on the mobo maybe. hard to believe a cable would just go bad that was working before. i've never run into this issue before.. any other suggestions before i start swapping out cables?

 

[corkyg]

Could be that the BIOS can't handle a 320GB drive. Aside from that, the key type must match the OS type, i.e., a Pro key only works in Pro. Home only works in Home.