DELL e3400 w/ AMI bios ver. 0aavep02

Recently had Hard drive go bad in dell. I bought a use one from a friend. He said it was blank but when i put the HD in the dell and boot up, I kept getting ...NTLDR is missing. So i put the HD into another system as slave, and it turns out the HD has 4 partitions. SO i removed them all using Partition magic. Formatted them into one partition. (NTFS 80 GIG) Took it out out it back in the dell. I still have my XP home disc with Product key. So i booted the dell, went into bios and changed config to boot from cdrom. reboot. After memory check, black screen with dell.com at top in blue bar and..it says
"Loading PBR descriptor 1... done." With a flashing cursor underneath. And that is as far as i can go.

So i download XP home SP1 bootable floppy. (6 disk) Went into Bios and boot from floppy. reboot. It will boot from floppy then I get to WIndows setup screen, and it ask me for disk 2. I put it in and after about 25 to 30 seconds, I get the error message. "File \ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded. The error code is 7. Setup cannot continue". So I checked some sites about this message, and I read that i needed to disable ACPI setting in the BIOS, but i do not see ACPI in my version.

So my question is can anyone tell me if it is possible to upgrade the Bios in that system w/o an OS installed in it. Or if that is at all what i need. I tried to go to Dell's site and it ask me for 5-7 digit service number. I cannot find it anywhere. I put in every number on the tower. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks for the help.