Win XP reinstall fails with new hard disk

need2sleep

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Jan 18, 2013
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I put a new hard disk (1 Tb, Toshiba DT01ACA100) into my Dell XPS 410. It's a SATA drive. When I run the reinstallation CD from Dell, it blue screens with 7D code, which means it can't find the boot sector on the hard drive. Well, it's a brand new drive, of course it can't find it. How do I tell it to create a new boot sector?

Additionally, this is my second XPS 410. The one I'm using to write this, is working fine on Win XP. Does that help me at all? If I put the new Toshiba into the working XPS 410, as the second drive, could I somehow copy its boot sector to the new drive and solve my problem?

Thanks,
 

need2sleep

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Jan 18, 2013
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Well that took me about 30 minutes to solve! Dell, in the XPS 410, provides 2 reinstallation disk colors, both labelled "Reinstallation". The Purple one states, "Reinstallation CD: Microsoft Windows XP Pofessional Including Service Pack 1a". The Orange one states, "Reinstallation DVD: Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Version 2005 with Update Rollup 2"

It turns out, that the Purple CD will load the XP drivers and then call the hard disk boot sector, then hang and finally give a blue screen with the 7D code. The Orange DVD will do the same up to accessing the hard disk, then not finding a boot sector will return to run further code on the DVD.