Problems Installing XP on old data drive

I've got a WD1600JB hard drive, been using it for data, one primary partition. My old boot drive just took a dump on me, but now I can't install windows on this drive.

The drive's already formatted and stuff, and has about 50gb of data on it, so I'd rather not reformat or repartition it.

So, I go to reinstall Windows XP Pro, it sees the drive, starts copying files and seems to get through the DOS portion of the install. When I reboot, and boot off the hard drive, nothing happens, never goes into the gui portion. I've tried using the recovery console and running fixboot and fixmbr, no dice. Also run chkdsk /r from the recovery console. Any other suggestions? There's nothing physically wrong with the drive, I put it in my other pc, can read and write to it, partition shows up as active.

I'm thinking either the boot sector or mbr (are those two the same?) is hosed and maybe it's not getting written to somehow.

Because you are going about this in an irregular manner, i would suggest either getting that stuff off the drive, or using a new one. I would always recommend formatting a drive before installing windows, as you will always have problems.

Why would I have problems? I've done this many, many times at work and had no problems. Just back up the customer's data to another hard drive, format the drive, restore the data, then reinstall windows.

I think my problem lies with either my mbr or boot sector. If I run fixmbr, the first time it says something about an invalid mbr, and then if I run it again, it still gives me the same error message. It may also be my motherboard or ide cables or something hard ware related. I'll try booting it in another pc later and see.