ok so i got a copy of windows vista buisiness and installed using parallels
(a virtual hard drive thing) on my mac (and it works fine)

then i installed it on my other PC and it worked fine but then since i already used it it stoped working after 30 days (i knew this would happen i just wanted to try vista out to see if i liked it enough to buy a new copy)
well i didnt like it and since i didnt have enough time to get a new version of xp for a couple of weeks i re-installed (30 more days of fun, yay!)
so anyway with about three days left on my trial i went to staples and bought windows xp home edition then tried to install it.
when i went to my computer and clicked on the icon the xp installation window came up
BUT!!!
the "Install Windows XP" option was faded and it wouldnt let me click on it
thinking it might be the computers fault i restarted it and guess what?
the trial was up and it only let me go into limited mode (which is basicall just internet) so then i tried to install xp from the boot menu so i restarted my computer and pressed f12 and the boot menu came up and i selected boot from cd rom
so it booted into the xp installation and it loaded all the files and stuff
but then when i pressed install windows XP it said
"No hard drives were found" and it said something about maybe u had to run a manufacturer program but i didnt think that was the case since it worked fine with vista
i then came to the conclusion that microsoft didnt want me down-grading to a less expensive os (that would explain the faded install windows xp option)
and, i had gotten a huge virus, that made the hard drives obsolete (because now, i couldnt even to into the limited access vista)

so i used a data shredder (it basically replaced all the binary with all 1's) and it seemed to be pretty good quality and it seemed like it worked
then i tried to install xp again from the boot menu

the same thing happened
it said "No hard drives could be found"

not wanting my computer to become good for nothing i installed a version af mandriva linux (called mandriva one) and it worked
its a pretty good quality version of linux

i thought now that the hard drive was in use, i would be able to install xp
well i couldnt. i got the same error message
and i couldnt install it from within linux either

somebody please help me i want windows xp

What we really need to know is the configuration of your machine with particular regards to the hard drive setup.

First of all, are you using a PATA, SCSI, SATA or SATAII interface? What physical drives have you got in your machine? Are you using a RAID configuration? Though Windows XP setup should detect things such as RAID or SCSI and load drivers, there are no guarantees and you may have to run a boot disk from the device manufacturer to detect your drives on boot. You will get the option to do this during the setup sequence (It says something along the lines of Press F12 to load a 3rd party device driver at the bottom of the screen).

As for the faded installation button, that is a result of running a newer operating system. The same occurs if you run a Windows 98 disc on a Windows XP machine - It won't let you run setup. If you want to overwrite your current operating system, you have to do it from setup on boot.