Unable to do a fresh Install of XP

[Ral23]

Hello,

I have a Dell Latitude d520 notebook. The Hard drive it came with was Toshiba sata 80gb.
One day it just failed. Turn the computer back on and it says no boot sector on internal hard drive. I brought a new drive, A Western digital SATA 500gb and i get the same message. I check the Bios and it clear identify the hard drive. I ran I through many different hard drive management programs including one from western Digital. All of them identify the drive and say it is healthy. I use Partition Magic to format the drive, Set it as active.

When I go to install xp it says No boot sector on internal Hard drive. Th cd would run and says, setup is inspecting hardware for configuration ...screen goes black and that is it. No blue screen Saying Windows Setup...nothing. It would freeze on the black screen. is there any way to fix this.

I have been at it now for almost a month. Help please.

Thanks in advance.

 

[mailpup]

Look in the BIOS to see if you have the option of setting the SATA controller to IDE mode. If so, Windows should proceed with Setup. If you don't have that option, you will have to install SATA drivers at the F6 prompt but that requires a floppy drive. If you don't have an internal floppy drive or and external floppy, you can make a slipstream Windows CD. Google for the process.

 

[Ral23]

Thanks, mailpup.

I tried that and even disabled the SATA option to load it as an IDE...to no avail.
I even went and gotten a Dell Xp windows disc with the SATA drivers on it. No Go.
I even ran both hard drives the original Toshiba and The New Western Digital under disk utility programs and all the programs identify both drives and state them as healthy and good conditions. I believe the bios needs up dating but was unable to upgrade it.

Now Its Dell problem now.
I appreciate the help though.after all these months I have had enough.

Thanks again.

 

[JamesP]

If you use a third party Boot disc such as "ultimate boot disk" can you see the hard drive then ?