Here's what i suggest. Whatever make your hard drive is, go to the mfgr website and download their diagnostic utility. You put that utility program on a floppy. Use a win98 boot disk to get access to the hard drive and then pop in the floppy with the h drive mfgr utility prog on it.
Start the program and find the command to "write zeros to the hard drive".
This has the effect of putting the hard drive in the same shape as when it came from the factory, minus some wear and tear of course, but good to go.
Then make sure the win xp install cd is in the cdrom and set the bios to boot first from the cdrom and second from the hard drive.
Then reboot and let it go. When it gets to the part during win xp install that asks what type of formatting do a full format NTFS.
All should be well if the hard drive is working right.
If you do this please let us know how you made out. It will work, the only way it wont is if you dont do it right or if the hard drive is bad.
One final item, only have the minimum installed on your motherboard when installing win xp, dont have extra pci cards or usb installed, only have keyboard, mouse, video, floppy, hard drive.
If your hard drive is sata you have one extra step to do but you didnt mention its a sata drive so i will guess its ide hard drive.