BleepingComputer.com: Hard Drive Installation Help... Please

My computer's(DellDimension XPS Gen 3) hard drive crashed a few days ago, we bought a new one that night (Western Digital SATA Cavair Green 1 TB), my father physically installed the new hard drive, but unfortunately it will not run the Data Lifeguard Tools? It won't boot from the cd at start up or if I select cd rom at the boot menu? I have been stuck for days, any help and advice would be greatly appreciated, I still have to install windows xp ... am I doing the steps right?

I guess...what are you trying to do that requires Data Lifeguard?

Do you have a MS XP install CD? Do you have a drivers CD? What CDs do you have?

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.as...606&lang=en

I see several different versions of the Data Lifeguard tools...do you have the correct one? Did you burn the CD after following WD guidance?

Louis

Louis,
The data lifeguard tools 11.4 cd came with the WD hard drive, per the manual after I physically installed the hard drive, I go to the "set up your hard drive" section in the manual, since windows is not installed (b/c the hard drive is not completely installed) it tells me to restart the computer and boot from the cd. I can not for the life of me get it to boot from the cd. To answer your questions I have the following cds:
Data Lifeguard Tools- which contains: drive installation, diagnostics and user documentation, it should let me add the hard drive as a boot device, and add the partitions.
I also have the reinstallation cd of microsoft windows xp home edition (already installed when I bought the computer new).

With many Dells, you hit F12 to bring up the boot menu. Have you tried that?

You can put the WD disk aside. Just use the Windows disk and it will take care of everything, usually.

But you have to get that CD drive to boot.



Good luck.

DR

DR,
After I couldn't get the lifeguard cd to load, I tried f12 and brought up the boot menu, then tried to install windows, I hit enter to do a complete install, then f8 to accept the terms/agreement and then it brings me up the blue screen to select which drive i want to install it on, then it comes up with a unknown disk drive (no disc in drive?) error, this is what made me assume that I had to add the lifeguard information first that way windows would recognize the hard drive...does this make sense?

Normally, you would then create a partition and then format it.

Does it have an error number? Can you write down exactly what it says? That would be very helpful in getting this resolved.


DR

By any chance...do you have both the old and new drive attached to the system?

Have you removed the connections for any other drives (internal, external, flash), other than the optical drive (used to do the install) and the new hard drive?

Louis