Is that bad for the HDD? I installed Windows, but Windows was corrupt, so I deleted the partition, created a new one and tried another CD, same thing happened, and I repeated the process about 3 times.
I am not sure if it is bad for the hard drive or not, but I remember reading about a similar issue someone was having... turned out to be a defective stick of RAM.
Yes ram can do this for sure. I had gotten some ram from a local mom and pop pc store and they gave me a faulty stick of ram. Told them about spending 3 days trying to fix it and they gave me the 1gb I have in my pc now.
No its not hard on your hdd, some people say the same thing about defragging the hdd. But it does have moving parts so the more you use it the quicker it will fail.