I was working on acomputer with the problem being that no operating system was found. The PC had XP previously. I ran some diagnostics and found no errors on HDD. Then I was getting mixed signals which led me to believe it could have been the HDD. Confused, I went ahead and reformatted, installed DOS successfully and continued to once again install XP. The windows setup began, files started transferring smoothly, then it froze. I left it all night just to make sure that it did actually freeze up. I then tried w2K to make sure it wasnt a problem with the XP disk...same problem. Does this seem to be a HDD problem? I am truly stumped. By the way its an HP 1.1gig celeron. ANy help would be appreciated cause its really stressing me out. Thanks.

First, why are you installing DOS? Are you formatting in FAT32, and if so, why? DOS cannot be run on XP.
My suggestion: cold boot with the XP system disk, choose new install (not upgrade), go into the format section and remove all partitions. That totally nukes everything on the disk. Reset your partition, format in NTFS, and the installation starts automatically when Format is complete.