Need Help Please on upgrading hard drive Dell Demision 8300

Many Dells give a message to strike a key to boot from CD.  Did you see this message after you restarted the computer and attempted to boot?  If you did, did you press a key?  If you get the message and fail to press a key within about ten seconds, the computer will ignore the direction to boot from the CD and try to boot from the hard drive.  Assuming you did that, or that you did not see such a message, do you have two optical drives, such as a CD ROM drive and a DVD drive?  If so, you need to try the other drive.  The optical drives are IDE so only the master drive will boot.  If you need to find out which is the master, just look at the ribbon cable to the drives.  The master drive is the one at the end of the ribbon, and the drive connected to the middle connector is the slave.

If you still cannot boot after locating the master optical drive, is the master optical drive a DVD or a CD drive?  I have seen some DVD drives that had trouble booting from a CD.  Try disconnecting the DVD drive and placing the CD drive at the master connector.  Reset the NVRAM using the instructions in your user's manual (click HERE, Clearing Forgotten Passwords) for clearing passwords and try booting again.

JackShack,

I did all of the above and it still happen the same way. I had a CD/DVD combo package.

I did went into setup and look at the configuration and both drives were off. When i adjust it to auto, reboot and the message came up that no drive was installed. So i went to alt +A and it showed that i had 1 and 2 drives with 320GB each. I have never had trouble with booting from CD drive before. This is the first time i experience this after changing new hard drive. I'm not sure if i miss out something such as jumpers, and cables.

I did put the xp disc and reboot it from CD drive and it works fine, except that i get a message that there was no hard drive installed in my computer. I did everything based on the manual and also based on WD instructions and still cannot reboot WD CD software to install drivers and application for the new drives.

Any help would be greatly appricated.

It appears that your Windows XP installation CD is missing the SATA drivers needed to allow Windows setup to communicate with a SATA drive.  Dell normally provides an installation CD that already has the drivers on it, but perhaps they weren't doing that with the 8300.

The drivers for your system are located here:  Dimension 8300 Win XP Drivers.  If you examine the list you will find a menu item labeled "SATA Drives (3)".  The first of the three files is the zipped file that contains the Promise SATA controller drivers.  Download this to a directory on the hard drive of the computer that you are using.

EDIT:  My first post was likely in error.  I have read the installation instructions which are different from the computers I have usually worked on.  The Zipped file will want to make a diskette for you when you double click the file, so you will need to have a 3.5" drive and a blank diskette in the drive when you execute the auto unZip function.  Read the instructions on the download page for the file for details.

If you have a diskette drive you will place the diskette in the drive during Windows setup when you see the message to press F6 to load third party SCSI drivers.  Once these drivers load, Windows setup should be able to find the hard drive.  Leave the diskette in the drive because setup will need to copy the drivers to the hard disk at some point.  Instructions on the use of the files are also posted on the download page for the Zip file.