Homebuilt system not working

[bemused_fred]

I recently completed by homebuild system with these parts:

I5 3570K@ stock
8GB DDR3-1600MHZ
Z77 extreme 4 motherboard
Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB
Sony 24x +/- DVD drive

I put all the componenents together and it powered on just fine, allowing me to enter the UEFI without a problem. However, it wouldn't install windows 7. It would always crash partway through the installation, either while finalising putting the files on, or after restarting and while updating the system registry.

I installed Linux to delete the corrupted files, and it ran fine off this, but while booting up, it would inform me that there were problems on the hard drive.

I tried installing sperate windows downloads off CD's and USB drives, but to no avail. I also tried formatting and re-partitioning the hard drive. Nothing. Windows also informs me that it can't install onto the hard drive because it's failing. Using Window's error testing systems, I was told that the problem was a bad hard disk.

However, when I used an old SATA 1, Windows XP disk from an old computer, it crashed immediately during install, even with the Caviar Black removed.

What on earth is the problem here? Could I please have some advice.

 

[o1die]

I would run memtest on each stick of ram; use one at a time in the nearest slot to the cpu.