the one i bought or copied? the one i bought was f-ed up i think kus all the system 32\hal file. it always corrupted soon as i made a new one it never messed up again. so id say it was the cd.
twice in the past week I had this problem. I had been reformatting windows on about 10 computers for a daycare center. now if it would have had a microsoft lock(MS will put something in the MBR to not let you install xp on that computer), format the hard drive with powermax will fix the problem. however formatting with powermax didn't work on these computers, plus they all had legit version anyway
the problem in both case was cheap cd-roms (one was a cheap cd-r) . when I replace them, the cd-rom copied the xp filesto the hard drive flawlessly.
when I took thm back. the lady told me that the HP computer would never let them install any programs on it the were on a cd. and on the emachine they said it could read scratched cd that good.