I'm trying to reinstall windows xp on my friends IBM, but everytime I put a boot CD in it does the inspecting your computers hardware and then hangs. I figured it might be a strange IBM problem so I pulled the drive and put it in another system and tried a boot cd in it, with the same results. Once I disconnected the hard drive I could boot off the cd normally. Any suggestions or is this drive totally fubared.

Did you format the drive first? You may want to try that after you backup your data. There is obviously something it is finding that is making it hang.

the drive should be totally formatted I had a program write all 0's to the drive after I backed everything up.