New Hard drive install old one crashed

my hard drive went out so i was going to get a new one to put in but a friend tells me i cant install without putting dos on first please tell me what i need to do !!! my puter was gave to me by an ex boyfriend he built it and installed everything i had on it so he gave me no disks or anything but it had windows 2000 on it originally he later installed windows xp

here is what i know about my puter

windows xp home sp 2
AMD Athlon xp 2000 mhz
radeon 7000 graphic card
bios : award modular
system manufact. : VIA Tech.
memory : 512 mb
can anyone help me ?

 

If you're going to install Windows XP on the replacement hard drive, I don't think you have to install DOS first. You may not even have to partition or format it.

I'm not an XP expert -- but I gather that if you can start the system from the Windows XP disk, you can do the partitioning and formatting as part of the installation.

The above assumes that the system can boot from an installed CD-ROM drive. Yours probably can, but you may have to go into the BIOS and change the boot settings to make the system do that.

 

You need to know what to do to get the new HDD inside your PC.
It is surprisingly simple to do this. Just be careful when you're in the case, not to damage anything.

When your new HDD is installed (physically), you can format it and partition it, this can be done during installation of XP.

As Rob said you must be able to boot from CD, you can enable this in the bios, which is usually accessed by pressing delete during start up, when prompted.

 

You will also need a XP installation disk to complete the procedure!