Here's the story I got a new Western digital hard drive to go with the rest of my antiquated hardware. Then when I intalled XP the setup stopped twice. After that my computer would no longer boot from a CD. I went into BIOS setup to select the boot order and there is no option for booting from CD. Eventually I used a utility that came with the HDD to copy my old hard drive to new one then updated to XP. I also want to put Linux on there. I tried saving the intall disks to a partion and intstalling from the HDD but no luck I want to do a clean install the only way I can think of requires a paper clip and some gum (think MacGuyver). Besides something is wrong and I dont want to do it until it is fixed. So what is wrong?

I had problems with installing XP because the memory was faulty. If you can, try replacing it. I don't think that will help your other situations though :(

Possibly use the 6 XP set-up floppies; they're around at the M$ site, also bootdisk.com. The latter site provides images which you save to a hard-drive, then (self-)expand to a floppy - logically you need 6 floppies.