Broke my PC :(

[Joe 90]

So, i bought the cheap £99 1tb spinpoint from ebuyer. and my PC now wont boot or install vista/xp

my system is:

AMD A64 3500
Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 (v1.0)
2x512 Kingston
2x512 Geil
Gigabyte Radeon HD 3850 Pro 512MB
120gb Maxtor ATA
250gb WD SATA
1tb Samsung Spinpoint F1

steps taken to install

• First off, as with any install, i plugged in the hd and scewed it in, booted up and vista said 'new hardware found' ... 'installing' ... 'system needs to be restarted'
• Fine - i restarted.
• On the next boot it sat on the blank screen, before you get the vista icon in't middle of the screen. Left it for a while without any change. Rebooted a few times but to no avail.
• Then i booted to my vista disk - ran a repair and rebooted. This time it flagged up an error with winlogon.exe
• Rebooted again and this time got an i/o error when trying to get the vista disk to boot. (same winlogon.exe error when trying to boot the hdds)
• Unplugged the tb hd and tried to boot. Again, i/o error.
• Unplugged older hdds and tried to boot to the tb hd - i/o error.
• So i next decided to boot my XP cd. It picked up my new tb hdd and i set it to format. Unfortunately this XP cd has no been binned because it failed to copy a load of files.
• Rebooted and then XP threw up that usual hal.dll error
• Ran XP setup again and it seemed to not be able to read my partitions table. My older hdds seemed to be read okay, but then it had empty disk entries and didn't read my tb hd. I repeated this a few times to no avail.
• Then tried to boot my ubuntu live cd, which after configuring devices would reboot. Also tried my Knoppix live cd but this also failed.

anyone got any ideas?
i'm tempted to just upgrade. was looking at going quadcore last week for under £300