M5500 help PLEASE

Well it finally happened. For some reason my 5500 does not find my hard drive no matter what I do. Along with this is the fact it no longer finds my cddrive unless I have the original boot disk. Any other cd just isn't seen. I installed a new hard drive and tried to re-install xp. It showed the partition tables on the new drive but would not let me delete them or change them. I know what I am doing to set up a restoration of a laptop but this one baffles me and the local guru as well. The original respawn disk goes part way through the process and then errors saying the file was not made with Norton's Ghost even though it was. I installed a new bios battery and made some changes to the bios but even though I click F10 (save and exit) the changes never seem to be saved and the date goes back to 2002 again and again.

I have had a lot of problems with this damned laptop right from day one but I have always been able to figure out a work around of some kind. Nothing works on this problem. Any suggestions? Thank you. 3's
Grampa

 

Have you considered posting your request for assistance in the Alienware Area-51/Aurora and Legacy Systems subforum?

 

I think that it would be best if you reformat the hard drive using a bootable 3rd party disc formating freeware (I use the free version of killdisk) and then install a fresh copy of windows XP if you have it. It sounds like the Respawn Disc isn't working as it should. Killdisk will clean up the harddrive as good as new for your new XP install.