[all variants] manual installation problem

For one reason or another, I've been needing to reinstall a couple of times in the past weeks and am facing a problem I hope you will be able to help me resolve.

Initially I installed Kubuntu 7.10 from is live CD without problems. I run the manual installation on a second hard drive in my desktop (where Windows XP was already running). The installation runs smoothly and I only need to correct Grub list in the end (it insists in configuring itself to start from hd(1,1), when (0,1) is needed. In april I did an automatic upgrade from adept that worked perfectly as well...

However, and here comes the problem, I've tried a clean install at least 6 times from different live CDs Kubuntu and even Ubuntu 8.04 that have all failed at the same point, around 50% of the process, with an input/output error that recommends me to clean the CD (i've already checked for errors and they came clean) or change my HDD for a new one (it's only one year old!).

This problems forces me to reinstall from 7.10 and upgrade from there but there is surely a solution to this. Anyone knows what might be causing this problem?

Thanks a lot,

Ignacio