Hard Drive Crash

Last weekend my harddrive crashed in my two month old 4600.  I have the 160 gig maxtor diamondmax 9.  After an hour on the phone with India (Dell Support) they agreed to send me a new  harddrive and let me install it as i cannot confirm when i will be available to meet the tech.  The harddrive arrived two days later and i installed it.  The harddrive was a preimaged unit with Windows XP home on it just like mine.   I installed it and it started to load XP.  Then a screen came on saying that my mouse and keyboard are disabled while my computer loads software.  I expected something like this to load the drivers.  The screen flashed about the mouse and keyboard and also flashed saying that it would be about thirty minutes.  After two hours I called dell just to see if what i was doing was correct.  After an hour on the phone i was told that what i was doing was correct and to just let the computer continue to work.  I agreed and they said that they would call back the next day to check on the progress.  About twelve hours later i gave up and on a whim tried to reinstall my old hard drive.  I decided to go ahead and reinstall the operating system over what was on it and it worked like a champ.  I originally kept getting a message at startup "loading pbr2...cannot find fixed drive"  or somthing like that.  Dell never called me back, here i am working on the same old harddrive that will maybe die again on me but who knows.  Thanks dell.  Anybody got any ideas?  let me know.  Later.