Ok ... most common cause of Don Joe screwing this one up would be...
not noticing the CD connected to the SAME ribbon cable..

But I keep saying the same old stuff ova and ova...

If there was a serious hardware problem it would not boot, so my bet is on the CD!

John if you need a Disk washer, get Seagate's free utility, fills em up with zeros. Then fdisk it or whatever you want to do with it.