I have a problem

I bought a new hard drive for my computer to replace the microscopic noisy original, and i just want to connect it as a single, and put a fresh install of windows xp on it.

Here's the problem, I hook up the hard drive to the last IDE channel, and i tried setting it to cable select, and master. When i put the windows xp cd in the drive, and boot up.
It boots up fine, and the light on the cd drive lights up, then it stops, and just says ERROR LOADING OPERATING SYSTEM. Its like it cuts off power to the cd drive before checking it.

So i go to bios, and make sure atapi cd rom is first, then hard drive, floppy, ... but it still does nothing

The windows xp cd i use is Windows XP professional SP2 office edition (you can install it on more than 150 computers)

I put the old hard drive with win xp back in, and it starts up fine.

Heres the specs
HP Vectra VL600
667mhz Pentium 3 slot 1 133mhz fsb
256mb pc-600 ram
10.2gig quantum fireball(original)
new hd 80gig WDC800
I know the 80 gig works because i had it running as a slave for a while.
Lite-on 52x cd-rom/32x cd-rw/16x dvd-rom
64mb ATI radeon 7000
Rosewill 350w p4 support psu

Disconnect the fireball from the primary IDE slot and install the new drive in the primary IDE slot. Windows is looking to the primary IDE channel for a drive to install windows on. Also with newer drives when they are the ONLY drive they sometimes require NO jumper to be installed.

Your machine is old enough it may also require a bios patch in order to recognize the drive as an 80 GB drive instead of 37GB.

It already has the latest bios update, and the 80 gig shows up as 74.5gb in the bios

Then the bios will not be a problem. But you do need the 80 GB as the master on the primary IDE channel.