Hard drive partition deleted, can't read HD?

Hello out there!

This si day one on MajorGeeks for me, so be gentle!

Okay, here is the set of circumstances that led to my major problem. I have a laptop (HP DV8000) that came with a tiny HD, so I bought a second one. I installed it, but didn't do anything with it for the time being, mostly used it for misc. storage and such. I was finally getting sick of having to delete files to make room for others, so I decided that I wanted to ghost my tiny HD, operating system and all, over to the newer, much larger HD. I used a program called HDClone to do so, and it seemed to work.

After all is said and done, my computer was still booting to the old HD, even after I told it to boot to the new one in BIOS. So here comes my stupid mistake. I used a program called Cute Partition to format my tiny HD, to force it, more or less, to boot to the large HD. However, the program decided to completely wipe both of my HDs clean. Now my computer doesn't even realize that HDs are there.

I ran an HD scanning tool in BIOS, and BIOS says they are both there and fine. But when I try using both the Windows DVD (to reinstall windows) that was sent with the laptop and another, separate Windows CD, both of them say that they are unable to locate a connected HD.

My thoughts are that Cute Partition may have corrupted both HDs when it erased them, maybe formatting them wrong or something? Either way, I need to either:

A) Find some sort of bootable diagnostic tool or other, more promising HD cleaning tool

or B) Buy a new HD, and hope to [insert diety of your choice here] that it works.

I am hoping for some free programs if possible because, unfortunately, I am a poor college kid and am not exactly rolling in excess money. I realize I made a dumb mistake trusting a program with 'Cute' in the name but hey, it did exactly what I wanted it to do, so why not?

Any helpful tips, tricks or advice would be absolutely wonderful!

Thanks,
~Mech

 

Well you could try Daricks boot and nuke which can be found here at MG's. This will wipe everything out on your hard drive then you can reinstall your OS.http://majorgeeks.com/Dariks_Boot_and_Nuke_d4596.html Click the link and it should take you there.

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major

I don't think that using another drive wiping tool will fix the problem since the drive(s) have already been wiped. The reason the XP discs are not reading the drive(s) is because XP does not have built-in SATA support. And I could be wrong here, but I believe that PC has built-in RAID (it does have 2 drive bays) and for it to work correctly with 2 drives, they must be the same size. So if you also tried a Vista disc, this would explain why it didn't see the drive(s). First, remove the smaller drive and put the larger one in to that drive bay. Leave the smaller drive out of the PC. Then boot to the Vista disc (if you have one) and it should install just fine. If you want XP, you'll need to format the hard drive BEFORE booting to the XP install CD. You can use the installation utility from the hard drive maker's web site. They have free downloads that will create a bootable CD just for the purpose of formatting the hard drive in preparation for an XP install. There's also some other free programs here at Major Geeks in the Drive Utilities section that should do it too.
:-D
Good luck!

(Check the BIOS for a setting that has "Native SATA support"; I have seen this setting in some Compaq laptops that prevented Windows setup from seeing the drive correctly; set it to "Disabled" if you have problems with Windows setup recognizing the single large drive by itself)