Hi guys I have a dell XPS and I wanted to put XP Home on it and wipe it clean. So I have a XP Home OEM and the sticker on the side of the PC has a XP Home Product key so I can just use that key instead of my own. However my problem is when I install the CD in the drive and press F12 for the boot menu and boot from CD it goes through the progress and CD is recognized and everything except when it should ask you to partition your hard drive an error comes up and tell me that there is no hard drive recognized. I know there is a hard drive in there because the PC has an OS on it and there is data on it. Can anyone tell me what is different about Dells to other computers that I don't know about. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

So when you power it on without a CD, does the machine boot up and load windows normally?

Yes right into the desktop.

If you have a SATA hard drive and it's not supported directly by the BIOS, you will need to load the SATA driver for the hard drive from a floppy disk. You would do this by pressing F6 when you see the F6 prompt.

If you don't have a floppy disk then use nLite to create a new XP CD with the SATA driver slipstreamed into it.

... and while doing that, slipstream SP3 as well and pre-answer a lot of the questions if you want.

nLite allows you to merge SP2/SP3/Windows Updates into a new XP CD image that you can install from. Takes a bit of fiddling with but worth the effort since it also allows you to pre-answer all the questions asked during install so all you have to do is boot the new CD, select where you want to install, format or not and go to lunch. When you come back the install is finished and your are at the latest Service Pack and Update level. See here:
nLite - Deployment Tool for the bootable Unattended Windows installation

You can download the SP3 .exe (redistributable) you will need here: Download details: Windows XP Service Pack 3 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals and Developers

Use this site to get the MS updates: Download Windows patches, service packs and updates for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7 and more.

Is the disk a dell disk? It has to be either a retail disk or a dell disk. You can't use one thats from, for example, HP. That could be why the drive isn't recognized.

Your question is also addressed and answered here;

format problem - PCMech Forums

Originally Posted by townsbg

Is the disk a dell disk? It has to be either a retail disk or a dell disk. You can't use one thats from, for example, HP. That could be why the drive isn't recognized.

No it is a retail disk. I acually got it formated but now I get a warning at the start that "The HD is not recognized Press F1 to continue" So when I press F1 it loads right into windows NP. Why is that warning there.

Originally Posted by Dan Penny

Your question is also addressed and answered here;

format problem - PCMech Forums

Thank you sir I kinda figured that out.