Well, I know I won't have any problems loading hardware drivers once I've got the OS installed again, so that's all good. I downloaded active@ bootdisk and made a bootdisk with a similiar environment to windows. From there, I can see the SATA hard drive (C just fine, and I already copied what I needed off it and wiped the drive. I didn't format it in NTFS yet b/c I know xp will already do that, but the point is that I could still see the hard drive just fine with no drivers at all. I just found out my g/f's got a usb 3.5" floppy drive I can use, but then again I'm not sure if it will assign it to A: once I plug it in. I'll have to check on that once I go work on it again...I did already download the hard drive drivers off dell, so I can go ahead and put them on a floppy (if I can find a blank one, lol).

What is an ultimate boot CD anyway? If it isn't going to help me install windows I don't think I'll need it, but if it does that be absolutely great.

I'm going to go try a few things with it and I'll post back once I've found some things out.

The UBCD is a bootable CD-ROM that loads a Windows XP shell into your RAM and allows you to troubleshoot different things, format drives, clean viruses out that would normally load into memory, etc. It is a great tool.

The computer should detect the USB floppy and assign an appropriate drive letter. Make sure that BIOS allows for it.

Good luck with the project I will check back again tomorrow.