Can I get the opinion of some of you knowledgeable guys out there, before returning what I have decided is a faulty hard disc?

I have an ageing Dell Inspiron 630m (Intel Pentium 1.73Ghz, 1Gb of RAM, O/S Win XP MCE) but with a minute 40Gb Toshiba hard disc. It's still useful so I bought a new Samsung IDE 160Gb 2.5" 5400rpm hard disc, with 8Mb cache, for a mere £40 from Ebuyer. After several fruitless attempts at installing the XP MCE system from the re-install CD provided with the laptop, I tried a different XP install disc from an old PC, and that will not install either. I have tried several full formats of the new disc, both as part of the install and via the USB port on my Vista o/s PC.

Everything is fine with the Windows install on the laptop until the reboot after Windows is set up, and it just does not boot from the hard disc. Eventually I get a simple message "Read failure on internal hard drive". An off-line inspection shows the Windows folder and files have been written to the disc, but it seems no (working) boot tracks.

Is this likely to be a faulty hard disc, or could it be a compatibility issue? Or has the partition supplied on the new hard disc be causing any issues?