please help... windows wont boot...

hi everyone... i know this is macrumors... but ive got a pc issue and i know many of you are much smarter about these things than i am... so here goes...

i have an hp pavilion thats about a year old... its an athalon xp 2400 so at least its not intel... anyways... it had an 80 gig hard drive that i decided would go better in my quicksilver... so i took it out... erased it etc... it works fine and is now happily running panther...

i have a forty gig drive that i replaced into the pavilion... so i popped that guy in and tried to load the restore disks... anyways... i got to the hp splash screen and i noticed it kinda stayed there for a while... but f10 plus restore disk 1 [of 8... how ridiculous is that anyways...] got it chugging along nicely...

after i went through the exchange of disks the computer went to reboot itself... the splash screen stayed on for way too long followed by a black screen with a blinking curser in the top left corner... finally the floppy drive tried to read and i get this error displayed on the screen... "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER"

so i try with restore 8, restore 1... nothing... so i go through the whole process again... [this would be winXP]... same results...

so i say F'it and go to try and load win98 instead... i pop in the win98 floppy... i go to fdisk and the drive is partitioned out... theres an HP RECOVERY volume... i wipe it out... format the drive... reboot... win98 goes through its install routine... when its done it prompts me to remove all disks and reboot... i do that... long splash screen and wam!!! same error...

so i try it again... and again on yet a different hard drive... last night around five am i even tried to load red had linux on it... same errors...

the hard drive has the OS on it... i tried going into the bios and setting the boot priorities to near every combo i could including the hard drive as all four steps... im at the end of my wits with this... its been two days of aggrivation a quite annoyed girlfriend and lack of sleep...

again... i know this is macrumors... but could anyone shed some light on it for me please... if ive left out any necessary info let me know... ive been through hell with this thing... all the while my quicksilver went nice and easy... i love the mac... but this HP is only a year old and cost me a grand... thanks so much...