cannot reload win xp

[teamo]

Computer in work is giving us trouble. It is a personal computer that we use for our own use not for the company. It was not booting up properly and had several error messages so I attempted to reformat and reload win xp pro. I have done this several times in the past with no issues with this computer. I changed the boot order to cd rom first and started up with the win disc. I checked off the format this drive "c" and then it entered the appropriate commands to install xp on the newly formatted drive. During the install there were alot of messages that said "unable to load file" and I was prompted to skip those files (there were about 10 in all) to continue with installation. After completion the system will not start and it say system error with a question mark and doesn't say what the error is. I tried with another win xp pro disc and the same thing is happening so it is not the disc. I get the post beep and the bios appears normal. I have limited info on the system... It is a gateway 450 mhz, and I think it has 512 MB ram. This machine worked fine up until about a week ago.
Any ideas about how to reformat and get the operating system installed?

[ktkendall]

Sounds like the hard drive is going bad and of course skipping those files is probably why XP doesn't work, along with the fact that the harddrive sounds like it's going south.

[glc]

Run diagnostics on both the hard drive and the ram. Hard drive diags can be downloaded from the hard drive manufacturer and ram diags from www.memtest.org.