The hard drive i got with the computer im pretty sure completely fried (when booting, it got past the first dell screen then went to a black screen with the white line blinking in the top left corner). So, i replaced the hard drive with a slightly larger hitachi (the original was a hitachi) so that seemed to have worked. When i boot the computer, now it comes to the second screen but says "No bootable devices--strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility". I downloaded Windows XP from my colleges website and burned it to a CD to boot with. It didnt work, so we unzipped it and then retried it as unzipped, still didnt work. We even wrote XP to a flash drive (which is an option on the boot menu) and it still didnt work. We went into the setup and made sure that the CD Drive and Removable Hard Drive were the first 2 and only 2 options for the computer to boot off of. I keep hitting F1 while the computer is trying to read the disc and all i keep getting is the same message "No bootable devices...". Is there something im missing here? Do i need to get a recovery disc from dell (didnt get one to begin with). Is there something i need to do to the XP files THEN burn them again to attempt to reinstall? Is all hope lost? lol

 

This is probably fairly simple to fix, i just have no clue. Thanks in advance!!