WinXP install - stuck - hardware or BIOS prob??

I've just been trying to install XP home on my new computer (from scratch, onto a clean new harddrive). It partitioned and formatted it OK, and seemed to be installing windows Ok. It then got to the stage where it wanted to restart the computer. I let it, it did so, and i was dumped right back to the start of the install process. This time it could see that the drive was partitioned, and could see that it had installed windows on it. I was advised that when it restarted itself i should have quickly removed the CD to force it to boot from the harddrive. I did that, but then i just got an PXE-E61 Media test failure, check cable error message while it was trying to boot. So i researched this error, and it seems to be quite famous, although mostly for laptops. Following advice again, i disabled the option of booting from the internal LAN (don't ask me why it would be set to do this, or what that means anyway) and that got rid of the error message...but the system still won't boot. It just sits there after it gets past the boot from CD line. So does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks for any help

EDIT: it's a SATA harddrive, but just in case i set the jumper on the CD drive to slave.