I thought of getting rid one of my machine and wanted to revert it's OS from Windows 7 to Windows XP Pro. Dusted off the XP CD bought in 2003 and tried several times with no success. It always failed with the following error as in the picture. I have tried with another XP CD, did CHKDSK /f, installed Dos and formatted, installed linux and tried to see of the MBR needs to be re-written where the XP cd is not able to. Finally, it seems the BIOS setting. I disabled SATA mode in the BIOS. That is all it needed to fix the problem.