This question is asked and answered hundreds of times on these forums.  Follow all of the links in the following reinstallation guide:

 

http://www.djdenham.com/Install%20Procedures.htm

 

Steve

Hello,

Windows XP does not know how to interact with your SATA hard drive, and/or controller.

When you first start booting the XP CD-ROM, you will see a little message splash along the bottom of the screen... press F6 to for driver diskette... or something along those lines.

You will need to track down the particular driver for the SATA interface. Go to the support page, and enter in your service tag number, and you should be presented with a number of options.

But you can try this

Well, I checked out other forums and found the answer. As suspected, it's a BIOS issue and simple to correct. I followed his directions (listed below) and was well on my way to a clean install. Reboot your system and hit F2 as soon as you see the Dell startup screen (the options are F2 for setup, F12 for boot sequence). In the System Setup screen, do these steps. Select Drives: Make sure your Diskette Drive (3.5 floppy) is set properly (Usually set to Internal) Make sure that "Drive 0: SATA-0" drive is set to "ON" Go to "SATA Operation": Your system proabaly came set to "RAID Autodetect / AHCI" - THIS SETTING CAUSES YOUR SYSTEM TO GO INTO AN IDE LOOP AND DOESN'T ALLOW IT TO FIND YOUR FACTORY INSTALLED SATA DRIVE. CHANGE THE SATA OPERATION SETTING TO "COMBINATION" Reboot - make sure that the boot sequence is set to CD rom before HD and make sure that the reinstall CD is in the drive. Setup will load, hit enter to reinstall XP. Your HD should now be detected and you should see the licensing agreement. If you have your files backed up I reccommend deleting the partition and reformatting prior to installing XP, it will give you that option after the license agreement. Once you have successfully reinstalled the OS, Dell reccommends that you change the SATA Operation setting back to RAID AUTODETECT / AHCI (or back to whatever your factory setting was) to avoid any problems with other IDE devices installed on your system.