I have a Gateway All-in-One and its hard drive has some error (as far as I know) and I beleive it's a physical error because it has happened multiple times the exact same way. Let me go into description:
1. Usually I install new software (I have tested with different ones, it isn't just a problem with that software) and the hard-drive starts spinning around 90k r/m (I think thats an accurate estimation). It is 72k hard-drive, no SCSI hard-drive for me:sad: .
2. A pattern I have noticed is all of these softwares have required to re-boot after installation. Once it re-boots, it continues to boot as normal until
3. At the Windows XP Home loading screen, it fails and re-boots after around 4 passes or so of the green loading bar (I, personally, don't fancy SP2, though it has happened when I had SP2 on it...) it re-boots again!
4. It keeps on going past Gateway screen etc. and re-boots again and again and again.
5. First time, I re-formated it and didn't worry about it (it was actually my first re-format, as I'm fairly safe with it).
6. It has happened about 4 times since then.
Can someone help me? Did previous owner overclock it and overheat hard drive killing it? Or did it die through other ways? Please reply!?!

The best thing to do would be to run some scans on your hard drive.

Could you start off with running a Full scandisk and a Defrag.

Would you be able to download BurnInTest Standard edition from this site:
http://www.passmark.com/download/

In that program you can go to the <configuration> - <test duty cycles> and disable everything except for `DISKS`

And then start the test, once it has finished it should tell you whether there are any faults with the hard drive.