Up grading hard drive windows cannot find

Ok guys I'm new to all this but it seemed simple enuff just take one out put the new one in well thats what i thought
anyway I have a dell xps 400 about a year after I got it new it crashed so anyway I called dell and they got me all booted back up But! nothing has worked right since so I desided to change out the hard drive and got a brand new windows program and desided to upgrade to a 750 gb from a 80 gb easy enuff right but when I tried to boot windows says it can't find hard drive but when I go to sys set up it says its there? any help would be great it says that there are program cd's but mine did not come with any the new hard drive that is.
I don't know mabe you can't up grade a dell I even got a seagate because thats what the 80 gb was who knows dell is no big help ether

Is the hard drive you upgraded the one that held Windows (Usually C:)? If that's the case, you have to reinstall Windows by placing its CD or DVD into the optical drive and restart the PC. New hard drives are not formatted when they are first installed, you have to tell Windows to do it. If you are reinstalling Windows, the setup program will do it for you.

the old one had windows xp the new one was brand new and held nothing on it and my computer did not come with any reboot disc so do I have to get it from dell ?
I also got a brand new windows xp program to install and its telling me it can't find the hard drive on my computer when I tri to install it

Are you trying to install Windows XP itself? I'm a little confused when you say "new Windows XP program", is this Windows itself or a program you run within Windows, like iTunes? I'm working under the assumption that you cannot boot into Windows because the computer is saying it cannot find the hard drive. If this is the case, you need a Windows XP disc to install the operating system, you can get it from Dell but they may charge you depending on your warranty status. If your computer has two hard drives and you replaced the one that did not have Windows on it, the new hard drive should show up in the Device Manager.

If your Original Drive was SATA I and the new one is SATA II you need to make sure your MB can support SATA II or that the drive is backwards compatible. Make sure you can see the drive in the bios. You will also need to install the SATA drivers (with a flopy Disc) When installing Windows XP. When booting to the windows XP installation you need to press F6 when it asks for Raid Or SCSI drivers. After pressing F6 wait for windows to continue loading files and it will ask for the drivers. It will look for them on your Flopy drive. If you don't have a flopy drive you will need to use another computer and slip stream them into your Windows XP installation using a program Called Nlite. If you need help slipstreaming your SATA drivers please let us know.

Edit: If you do not have a floppy drive. You can see if your bios supports IDE emulation it will be in the advanced settings in the bios menu. I cant tell you for sure without knowing what model motherboard you have.

Edited by Sneakycyber, 16 March 2009 - 05:36 PM.