press any key to boot

hi there, this post was a bit similar to one last august .. when i try and load a win 7 or vista c.d. the same things happen on 3 different units, a sony vaio laptop, a dell 1750 laptop and a dell optiflex desktop. here it is. i have wiped the hard drive formatted using a piece of softwere. i reconnect hard drive and insert disc and start up . the installation goes all the way through then comes up with " finishing installation" the pc wil reboot . when it reboots for i think should be the last time, the message about " press any key to boot from c.d. or dvd" comes up. then a few dots appear then it freezes and thats it. just a few more things, i have tried all of the 3 p.c.'s loads of times and i have changed the boot order but nothing, i can see that the memory has been used as 4gb approx is being shown , used from blank 140g. the disc must be ok because i only used a month ago and all went fine.i even tried an old xp disc and the same thing happened.
well i know this is prob a walk in the park for you guys and i would like to thank you for reading my post...cheers tg

Many thanks for your answer. I have tried that and it still hangs after press any key to boot front cd etc. I have tried putting hard drive in another laptop, dell 1750, but same happens. Thanks tg

Thanks for reply. The software I used for formatting the hard drive was. Easeus. I've used it quite.a.lot in the past seems ok. I tried what you said on the 3 units, 2 laptops and a desktop, wiping hard drive each time after failed attempt as the used memory shows up. The 3 units all have various amounts of memory.from 1g to 2g.. anyway still the same thing happens. The installation goes right the way through to final reboot, then when it comes up' press any key to boot' the dots appear one by one then locks up. Please help

Many thanks my.friend.I.will try this again. I have already done this but I'm thinking that if the only thing constant between the 3 units is the disc then I've got nothing.to lose. Top man cheers

well guys ive tried all you said so i moved on to trying it using a usb flash stick. i have a 16g tdk which i formatted before i started, then i went to the link recommended here to download a new iso image, i dont know if its anything to worry about but whilst downloading, AVG picked up a generic trojan but i carried on. anyway i used the windows tool for loading an image onto a usb stick so it would boot, it was now a bootable stick. i changed the boot order in the bios to start with a usb storage device and away we went. it booted, loaded went all the way through to the completing installation line then said it will reboot or i could press a key to do it manually. at this point it rebooted and started reloading it all again from the start. ive also tried doing this by selecting the one off boot order (f12) when i select usb storage as first boot and leaving the bios order with the HDD as first boot, still nothing as it hangs with the flashing cursor. i have tried 3 different bits of software for making the win7 onto a bootable usb. also i used a vista disc where i copied all the files to the usb and booted with that and yes it does the same, does not finish installation after final reboot.i am doing this on a dell inspiron 1750 and each time i have an unsuccessful attempt i reformat the HDD. im thinking it cannot be the software because ive used so many copies so it must be something with the laptop.. hey what do i know, you are the experts and i thank you for reading this..cheers