XP load issue

Conceivably, you could have bad sectors on the drive. You can test drive sectors with something like Hiram's boot disk, well, there's more than one way to test it.
Especially with laptops that many times use proprietary hardware, you may wind up buying a new samsung drive. You will be advised by samsung, or the replacement manufacturer about the replacement drive. Look inside and see what model drive is installed. Laptop manufacturers frequently do not use standard hardware, but that varies according to model and date of manufacturer.

You might take a peek under the hood and replace the CMOS battery, a small disk shaped backup battery that preserves the CMOS configuration memory. The failure of an install because of a bad battery is un-common but possible. I have seen that cause problems once or twice.
When failure occurs, it may not be a bad idea to clear the CMOS settings before reformatting and trying another install. You need to download the motherboard manual to find the jumpers. Sometimes there is an intrusion block jumper on the board which can be disabled.

One more trick is to have internet connected during an install. SP3 could ask during the install to connect and download updated versions. Watch that during install, use that option if you can.

Now if the thing fails install, you can also try the operating system repair install option, instead of reformatting and starting all over. Now I'm not saying that it will work, but in this case it's worth a try. When you get to the format stage, select repair existing installation instead of format.

Thanks for the response.

I checked for bad sectors, to no avail. The comp is only about a year out of the factory, 8 months in my possession... so I think the battery should be ok. My inclination is towards a software issue, but since the comp only came with a restore section on the HDD... I am reluctant to attempt to re-install. If things worsen I may be forced to wipe the CMOS and re-install windows... but I would probably switch over to my ubuntu partition before I resorted to that. I was interested to hear that laptop HDDs are proprietary, this is my first laptop as well as my first pre-build... so I am just ignorant (blissfully). In any event, I appreciate the completeness of your response. Thanks again!

Hard drives aren't proprietary.

If this is a recent problem, try using the restore points to roll back to before the problem started.

Have you tried to run system restore, setting the drive back to a time before the computer became corrupted? Some of the new viruses prevent system restore from running, but it''s worth a try. Restore does not erase your personal files and is reversible.
click start
click all programs
click accessories
click system tools
click system restore
check the box that says restore my computer to an earlier time, click next
select a bold date on the calender, a date before the problem started, click next
follow through with the restore directions
restart the computer after it finishes
if the system restore does not work, select an even earlier bold date on the calender and repeat the procedure
try this with at least four earlier dates before giving up and trying something else

Is there an echo in here?