Weird HD formatting/bad sectors/etc

[4midori]

Hi,

I have a Dell 1GHZ machine with Win 2000. Recently I started to get a "bad boot disk in a:" message. I was booting up normally, with no disc in the a or cd drives.

The message was intermittent, and a restart would usually cure it. Then it kept coming up, so I ran scan disk at the next boot up. Scan disk ran all night, but stopped at 35%, and had found some bad sectors.

I've replaced the HD with a new one (normal ATA) and reinstalled Win 2000 from CD. However, the first two times I reinstalled it, it froze when it got part of the way through formatting the new HD.

FYI, I had a bent pin on my a: drive, fixed that and now a: drive is fine. But I don't see how they are related.

Motherboard problem? Bios problem?

Would Norton Systemworks help? Win 2000 is okay for now, but I don't want to spend a whole day reinstalling stuff only to have it fail again.

Please advise, thanks.

-Ben