XP home hangs during install (with 2 mins to go)

[Jetpilot]

Long story... sorry in advance... thanks for all help!

Have a Gateway laptop that is 2 years old. 1.8 P4, 512mb, 64mb vid. XP had been running VERY slow and explorer.exe kept encountering prolblems and restarting about every 5 minutes. Decided to try a fresh install of XP from the disc that came with it. Worked great until 2 minutes to go, then freezes. I then decided to format the c: drive and start fresh.

Heres what I've done:
1) Created a win98se floppy boot disk. Repartitioned c: with Fdisk.
2) From the Ramdrive D: I formated the c: drive.
3) Restarted computer with XP cd, and started a fresh install.

Results:
The install picks up at step 3 (installing windows) with 39 mins to go, it never asks for a serial number and then continues to hang during (saving settings) with 2 mins to go.

My thoughts:
Seems like the c: drive isn't blank even though I've formated it. How can I truly delete the c: drive so XP starts from scratch?

My $1400 laptop is nothing but a paperweight right now and its really pissing me off. Thanks in advance for any and all help.

[daemonOS]

Did you try to clean the disk? Do you have another copy of it? Sorry but those are my only two things I can tell you to try. You might reduce to simple hardware like CPU, Video, Hard Drive and CD-Rom.