Someone please help, I am a total retard. I got this laptop (well most of it) but it didn't have a hard drive. I got it free so no jokes.... Anyway I went and bought a hard drive for it, Seagate ATA 20Gb, and put it in. The guy at the store obviously lied, but I can't take it back because I bought it in NY on vacation, and I live in KY. HE said all I had to do was plug it in and it would work. Well I put it in and all my laptop would do is keep saying "no boot sector on hard disk". Can anyone pleae help me, keep in mind I am a total ***** to this, I thought I had to atleast get dos or something on it before installing an OS. It is an older laptop, Dell Latitude CPt but has good memory, and a basic processor. Not bad for free I guess, but what do I need to do to make "no boot sector on hard disk" go away?

get a retail version of Wndows, install the CD and boot from it.

This will start the install process and solve the MBR issue and give you a running
system.

I figured that, but was hoping it may have been something I could have done from here. Thanks for the help!

So, is there already an OS on there? Like, it's just not finding the boot sector? Because if so, you might be able to use that fixmbr command in the recovery console from the windows xp install cd.

You could probably also use the gparted live cd to format it. Obviously, there wouldn't be anything on there anymore, so then you would definitely have to install something.

No, it was just purchased a few days ago. I already got a new OS to put on it so I will see tonight if it works! Thanks for the reply!!