Replacing laptop hardrive question

[AgentUnknown]

My old drive died in my dell laptop. I bought a new one, installed it. When it boots up, it says "No boot sector on hard disk, no bootable devices" Drive is set to master.

What do I do now? I go to my setup utility but there is no option to format the drive. Nothing else happens, and it gives me the option to retry or setup utility.

 

[AgentUnknown]

Also it recognizes the drive in bios.

 

[AgentUnknown]

can anyone help me?

 

[Tipsy Turtle]

Have you tried installing the OS on it?

 

[sonoma1993]

Originally posted by: AgentUnknown
My old drive died in my dell laptop. I bought a new one, installed it. When it boots up, it says "No boot sector on hard disk, no bootable devices" Drive is set to master.

What do I do now? I go to my setup utility but there is no option to format the drive. Nothing else happens, and it gives me the option to retry or setup utility.

you need to reinstall your operating system

 

[Laputa]

Boot up with that Dell OEM XP CD and start the installation from there. You don't need to set the laptop HDD to master mode. It will be in Master mode with no jumpers on.

 

[btcomm1]

Sounds like you haven't installed Windows XP on it, you would need to use the cd like laputa says. If you got one of those computers that comes with a recovery partition on your HD instead of a CD sounds like you are going to have to find someone else that actually has Windows XP home or xp pro whichever the COA on your laptop specifies.

 

[zodder]

New drives come unpartitioned, unformatted and unbootable. As the others have stated, installing your OS will take care of it.

 

[Fraggable]

You haven't formatted it yet.

If you use a Windows XP (or Vista) CD to boot from, it will ask you to format the drive early in setup. That's the easiest way to do it.