Vendryx

I recently got some errors and what not, so I started to reinstall Windows XPSP2. As I tried to install it, it finished the reformatting part, and then when it was copying files, it could not seem to copy any of them. So I tried to run Windows Setup again, but now it cannot detect my harddisk drive or something along those lines. So I am stumped as to what to do here. I had my computer made by a friend, who then moved away, so I am no good at this kind of stuff. So if there is a way to fix this problem, a newbie friendly description would be nice.