help with my laptop please

teenage_Drama

hi

well i received my new hard drive today so i replaced it with my old hard drive cos it was causing trouble.

i also received my new system restore cds from dell and inserted a dell windows xp restore disc and so i turned the laptop on

still came up with the msg ' no boot sector on internal hard drive, no bootable devices, strike F1 to reboot , f2 for setup utility'

why isnt the cd working and how do i make it work?

and even though the hard drive is in secure with no damage why am i still seeing this black screen with that msg on?

Browntoa

try CTRL f11 on boot up when you see the Blue Dell bar at the top of the screen

if not then you need to access bios, the F2 key on most dells but a list here

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/bios_manufacturer.htm

change the boot order to boot from the CD drive first.

I have the feeling that they have sent an unformatted drive which will not have the restore on it yet or any operating system

rogerramjet

System probably needs to be set to boot from CD which it appears not to be, or the cd is not bootable....The hard drive will not be formatted and will have no operating system (Basically it's blank) and therefore will not be recognised.

F" should allow you to enter the bios and check/change the boot setup settings

teenage_Drama

Boot sequence

1.CD/DVD drive
2.internal HDD

teenage_Drama

thanks

the cds working now