Thanks for your reply,

I have tried replacing the cable - no difference.
I have returned the HDD 3 times and replaced it each time, and still no change. As long as the partition is not the boot drive, ntfs works fine. Its only when the machine attempts to boot of an ntfs partition. Strange that everything worked fine when a partitioned part of the drive to FAT32, then converted it to ntfs - it worked fine until microsoft updated my windows - then back to square one "A Disk Read error" so I had to do the whole thing again but left it at FAT32. With win server 2003 - it will only install on FAT32.

I'm thinking that it could be a combination of a bug on the windows formatting installation process and the particular HDD: 320 Gb Seagate ST3320620A Barracuda 7200.10, IDE (PATA), 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache, 11 ms.

Just don't know what to try next - maybe another smaller HDD to install the OS on which may allow me to format in NTFS - not really sure yet.

Any more ideas would be great.

Thanks