Windows XP Bad image error on a empty hard drive with a fresh Win install

[Dimitrov96]

A relative of mine asked me to reinstall his laptop because he was getting constant errors and could not operate on it. Its quite an old Toshiba satellite with a Pentium 540, 1gb ram and integrated video. I installed an XP but it was getting those errors again, decided to wipe his whole hard drive, deleted all partitions and created new ones when reinstalling again and it would all work well until I restart it once after installing the win. I tried without installing drivers at all, with installing them, even win updates. Every forum thread related to such errors says its most probably a virus but how can a virus be there if I completely wiped the whole hard drive. I did roughly about 5-6 reinstalls for 2 days and right now its with a google chrome and skype installed and they're both getting these errors for bad windows image. Really out of clues. Help will be appreciated, thanks in advance
P.S. At a certain point I thought the win disk I'm using might be corrupted so for the last install I used a different one and checked the image used for it with avast, its clean.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

More likely a failing hard drive rather than bad installation media.

Test the hard drive with a bootable CD containing Drive Fitness Test for DOS. The CD image is here:
http://www.hgst.com/hdd//support/download.htm#DFT

You can use IMGBurn to create the CD (use a blank CD-R): http://filehippo.com/download_imgburn/

When you've made the CD, boot the laptop from it.

 

[Dimitrov96]

More likely a failing hard drive rather than bad installation media.

Test the hard drive with a bootable CD containing Drive Fitness Test for DOS. The CD image is here:
http://www.hgst.com/hdd//support/download.htm#DFT

You can use IMGBurn to create the CD (use a blank CD-R): http://filehippo.com/download_imgburn/

When you've made the CD, boot the laptop from it.

Thank you, I'll try that even though it may not be needed as I gave up on installing Windows and I decided to put Ubuntu, its been working perfectly fine for a couple of hours now. Thank you for the reply Philip.