I believe that it may be a problem with the Management Information Format Database (MIFD) stored by the earlier OS you had installed...The MFID is stored in the master boot record which is a separate partition from Windows. You may need to format the entire disc and do a fresh Windows install. Did you change any major components from that earlier OS install? Maybe the MBR has been corrupted or your HDD has suddenly gone south. Is it new or reused?

I had a similar issue installing WinXP on a laptop HDD connected to my main machine...once the drive was back in the laptop, Windows wouldn't load because it had all of my main machine's hardware settings and couldn't find those components in the laptop...