Need Help - Cannot reinstall Windows XP

[sb14blue]

My hard drive died, so I got another hard drive (used but it works). I attached the new hard drive and went straight to BIOS. In BIOS, I set the 1st Boot Device to CDROM so I can load Windows XP. When I Saved and Exited BIOS, I received an "Invalid Boot Diskette...Insert Boot Diskette in A:" I went back to BIOS and disabled the other boot devices so the CDROM was the only Boot Device listed. Same message. I then switched to another CDROM from a working computer. Same message. Then I disconnected the Floppy cable from the motherboard. Same message. I then switched IDE cables for the hard drive and CDROM. Same message. I then took out the motherboard battery for ten seconds and placed it back in. Same message. Everything in BIOS seems normal. There are no beeps during post. Can anyone please help me?

 

[Slugbait]

Assuming the optical drive is the only drive on the ribbon, my first guess is that jumper is set to Slave.

Of course, there are likely other assumptions, since we have no real configuration detailed. For example, got any USB devices attached? Those can wreak havoc.

 

[sb14blue]

Thanks for helping. The only components that are connected are one hard drive (set to master), one DVDROM (set to master), and the monitor, keyboard and mouse. There are no other connections. The floppy drive is disconnected and is disabled in BIOS. The only other change I made in BIOS is I set the 1st Boot Device to CDROM and disabled the others. I don't understand what is wrong. The computer was working before the old hard drive failed (the drive started crashing with a blue screen and an 0x000000... error message). Unless I am mistaken, that error message is a hard drive failure... correct? Is there something else that might have failed? BTW, here are the specs of my computer:
Dell Dimension 4100
PIII 1Ghz
512MB RAM
Are there any other configuration details that I should list that would help you out?

 

[sb14blue]

Fixed it! The hard drive had two partitions. One partition was the EISA configuration. For some reason the computer would not read this partition. I deleted it using the recovery console on the XP cd on a different computer. Thanks Slugbait for your input.