Installation troubles, Need advice

[leachja]

Hello everyone,
I have been having some trouble installing Fedora onto my computer.
I partitioned my hard drive a while ago, I took 60GB for Xp pro, and left the other 70gb and saved them, planning to install Linux onto that partition.

Today, I downloaded the files, checksummed them all and burned them all to CD's.

I rebooted, changes my boot order and started the installation.
Everything was going great, installation started, I got past selecting which partition I wanted Fedora installed to and everything, the installation started writing files, I believe and then gave me a "serious error, installation cannot continue" and shut down. I turned the computer back on, rebooted into XP and then decided to retry. I then started looking at all the menus at the front Fedora loader, and decided I should try a memtest.
I let memtest86+ run and it got all the way through to 100% pass and then restarted the testing. I therefore hit escape, rebooted and tried to install Fedora again. Now, it hangs everytime at the Keyboard selection screen (I assume this is because this is the first time I tries to either write or pull from the hard drive. It also tells me, after about 5 mins that there is an input/output error with the hard drive.)

Also, now, when I try to boot windows from the hard drive, I get nothing, just a blackscreen after it posts and does everything like normal, just no windows xp loading and everything else.

If anyone has any idea what I could do to get it back up and running I would appreciate it, it seems very hard drive related to me and that should be fairly remediable. My hard drive is fairly new also, so I doubt that it went bad just then.
Thanks,
Jared

[Sarthan]

>> input/output error, it does 'smell' like a hard drive problem , could you reinstall on a different hard drive or make sure the hard drive is properly connected to your system?

[leachja]

Yeah, I know that the hard drive is installed correctly, I have been using it in XP for about 4 months or so and had no problems. I was wondering if anyone had heard of memtest86+ messing anything up, because it is after I ran it that I ran into problems.

Unfortunately, I don't have an extra hard drive to try reinstallation.

[bob]

Memtest shouldn't do anything, since it's stressing ram, not your HD. Go to the HD manufacturer's site and download their testing tool. Just because it worked for awhile doesn't mean it's not going to fail. I had a drive that seemed to be perfect for about a month or so and then began quickly dying. Here's what happened in my case - sounds familiar: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=91816