New Hard Drive Help

Ok i have a older pc hp pavilion xg836, and the hard drive fried, it was running windows Mill. So i went at bought a new 120 gig seagate harddrive to put in and a 256 mb ram so i can run xp on it instead of ME. Now my question is i have xp home edition ,(says its an update) and i want to know how to formate the HD on the hp with no bootable drive on it.

I installed the ram and the bios shows 320 since i left the olde 64mb ram in it and added the new 256mb, and ran the disk that came with the hd, and nothing seems to work. if you can advise me on what i am doing wrong and show me the light it would be great.

if you need any more info, i can get that as well

Thanks

Eric

 

i have the boot disk, but the hd isnt formatted, is there something im not doing to make the recovery cd work?

if i have to recover the pc to the origanal state then update to xp thats fine but i dont have a bootable hd ....

i put a slave hd on my other pc and that was easy but this master stuff is tricky im finding out

Later

Eric

 

ok ill give it a try....im pretty sure it is set up like this

floppy
cd-rom
hardisk
dvd

now will it matter if it isn not the original hd? or will the recover cd formate it for the pc?

Thanks

Eric

 

Sometimes it does matter if you replaced your hard drive with one that differs from the original. I know eMachines used to be bad about programming the discs to only work with certain hardware. Also, to set your drive as a master instead of a slave, there are small jumpers on the hard drive that actually should have been set to either master or cable select when you bought it. Just make sure it is set to master unless you are booting two hard drives.