HELP! XP PRO Upgrade to New HD

I need help! After a week of frustrated troubleshooting I have discovered that my HD is going, going, gone. Well, that is unless you standit upside-down and like yer left finger,.....

Anyway, I bought a computer that came without any backed up images. (shame on me) and I refuse to spend an extra $100 because my HD decides to go south. If I boot linux and successfully mount the drive I can see all the files, but can't boot XP up. It's dying even in safe mode and cycles back around to constantly reboot. <== this is when the drive is being good, other wise I just get " OS not found" or "ERROR LOADING OS".

HELP? I have my own brand new copy of WIN XP PRO but it's an upgrade version.

The only help I can offer here is that the XP disk you have might say "upgrade", but it is still a full installation of Windows. You just have to prove to them that you own a copy of Win98 first in order to activate it.

As far as teh drive goes,.. if you don't care about losing any data, then be sure to format the drive in NTFS during the beginning of the Windows installation. In other words, boot from the CD, then format to NTFS, then install.

Like webhead said boot from cd and install, you will have to put a windows 98 or nt or win 2000 disc in during install for varification then it will tell you to eject and replace the xp pro and continue.

Windows loaded & set up for the most part... No sound... (on Board) but the biggest problem.... It won't shut down. The initial shutdown started 6 updates. Windows is displaying that it is installing the 5th update for the last hour. Processor / HD activity light hasn't flashed for a s long as I can stand to watch it without wanting to throw the whole thing in the trash and buy a MAC.

What's up? Anyone have this happen? Should I kill the power and deal with the fallout?

Be sure to install all the mobo drivers and SP2 for WinXP. Oh,.. and I would replace that hdd. Sounds like it's bad.