Hi, i recently built a computer with an abit an-7 mobo,a 160gb maxtor hdd, 512mb of ram and a radeon 9250...anyway

I was booting up for the first time with the OS (winxp home) in the cdrom rom drive, everything was going peachy until it came to formatting the hard drive, it took about an hour or so but when it was complete an error came up saying that it was unsuccsessful and the disk may be damaged... i then tried a "quick format" and then the setup decided that the disk wasnt inserted into the cdrom drive, giving up i quit setup and rebooted, on the next cycle on startup a message "error loading operating system" popped up and now wont go away... what can i do to stop this, and what can i do next time to make setup sucessful.
Thanks alot, any input it much appreciated.
John