I had a similar problem, and replacing hal.dll and hal.ini didn't fix it. I also 
had trouble installing and repairing xp with the cd, I kept getting read errors on 
drivers.cab and n*.* files during installation.
I had just added some new hardware to my computer, a water cooling rig, when it all 
started. The cpu/system temperatures were all below 50 degrees celcius, and not overclocked, 
so overheating wasn't the problem.

The problem was my 300W power source, it couldn't handle the load of all the devices, 
so when the hard drive and cdrom were running at the same time they would not get 
enough power and failed to read/write.

The solution was buying a $80 600W power supply that can deliver more than 30 amps 
to the 12v lines. I also bought molex to 3-pin-fan adapters so I could avoid running 
so much power through the motherboard, and connect the fans directly to the psu.
The alternative was to remove power hungry devices or buy another relatively cheap 
"dedicated 12 volt" power source, which would then give me two seperate sources of 
power inside my computer.

I have a multi-boot setup, two partitions on my 200GB hard drive.
My second partition will still not hold winxp, it got badly corrupted I bet, so I'll 
have to reformat that after recovering files from it.

In your bios screen, if you have a PC Health Status option that shows cpu temperature 
and volts, look at the voltages. Are they lower than they are supposed to be, or 
do they fluctuate by more than .1 every second? With my 300W psu, the 12v was below 
11.9, now with 600W it's between 12.09 and 12.03v, and the other voltages do not 
fluctuate at all.

You could temporarily remove any unnecessary pci devices, >extra< hard drives or 
dvd/cd rom drive, or case fans. If that helps than one of those devices may be damaged 
or your power source can't handle them.

Your WinXP disc should have options for erasing before installing.

If the power source isn't the problem than here are other possible causes, in order 
from most likely to least likely: hard drive, ram, motherboard, cpu or possibly video 
card.

An easy thing to check are your sticks of ram (if you have two, remove one, alternate 
which slots the sticks are in, turn off "fast post" in the bios, etc.), and moving 
the hard drive to another computer, to see if it works there. Check for leaking/bulging 
capacitors on the motherboard, that's a sign of a physical defect and you should 
replace the motherboard if they are.

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