[all variants] Crashes on 15% of installation

I've recently downloaded the installation/live disk of unbuntu 8.04.

I've tried many times to install, but it seems to keep on crashing.

At first tried dual booting with windows xp, somehow along the line it came up with a harddisk error on bootup, so I scrapped the idea of dual booting and just tried installing ubuntu over windows xp as opposed to disk partitioning.

Now there's no operating system on it (Which I could still put XP back on). But I would prefer it ubuntu actually could install as my laptop has pretty low specs (1ghz processor, 256mb ram, 20gb hdd) so you can see my reason for wanting a operating system like ubuntu.

I tried openSuse which failed aswell, but on that installation it came up with some type of media error to do with the CD/DVD drive.

It normally crashes on 15% of installation on ubuntu which is something along the lines of "gathering file information" which makes me think it's a problem with the HDD.

Oh and a final note, it has a small problem with overheating, which when on XP would just shut the machine down. But now I placed it so there's plenty of air to the fan, which doesn't appear to now cause any problems, doesn't shut the machine down, but seems mightily hot near the fan duct.

Is there anything I could do, it seems it refuses to want to install any new linux operating system, and I guess it's back to XP (which runs OK though). Anything anyone could suggest?

PS- Am I using the best linux available, or would I be better off with xubuntu which is better for low end specs?

Thanks.