Need All Available Experts To Help Me Fix My Pc

[Ob1]

alright i need some help here guys. ill give ya a little background on my pc and the dilema i currently am faced with. i have a dell dimension 4700, with P4 2.8, 512 ddr2 ram, 160gb sata hd, integrated audio/video, floppy drive. i had partitioned my drive as follows 15gb for win XP pro which i have been running since i purchased the pc. i had 120gb partition used for storing all of my data.i had 15gb of unpartitioned space that i left in case i wanted to install another OS. i decided that i wanted to take a look at the windows server 2003 enterprise edition evaluation cd. so i took the eval cd, and booted to the cd. my system recognized the disk. i selected the unpartitioned space and formatted it to NTFS. after the progress bar got 100% it stated that formatting the disk could not finish because of an error. so i shut down the pc and booted back to the eval cd. now when i go to look at the partitions currently on my drive, it states that it cant find any hard drive installed on my pc, just like it normally does when u have to use 3rd party drivers for sata drives, but i never had that problem before when i installed XP pro, or when i first tried to install win server 2003. so i tried booting up windows XP again and now i get an error message stating:
NO BOOT DEVICE AVAILABLE
STRIKE F1 TO RETRY, F2 FOR SETUP UTILITY
i tried F1 and that error message keeps coming back.

so now i tried running my windows xp pro cd to see if i can get that back on my pc. when running this cd im able to get to the window that shows me all of my current partitions, but now it shows this:
152070mb disk0 at ID0 on bus 0 on atapi
(setup can't access this disk)
it still gives me the options to delete partions etc, but if i push any key on the keyboard i get a BSOD and it states:
technical information:
***STOP: 0x0000008E, 0xC0000005, 0xF84D4E4C, 0xF80CD778, 0x00000000
***Setupdd.sys - Address F84D4E4C base at F84B0000, Datestamp 3B7D8507

I have tried using the windows cd that came with the pc and i still get the message stating: (setup cant access this disk)
i have looked on dells website for sata drivers to use when installing win 2003 server eval cd but there are none that i can find or know of.
basically i am stuck right now and i need some help..........
is my hd broke? is there some settings in the BIOS that i can check or change to fix this problem. thankfully i backed up all important data so that is not an issue.

I need some help from the experts???????????????????????????????

[glc]

Have you tried the recovery console - chkdsk, fixboot, fixmbr? You may wind up zero filling the drive and starting fresh.

[rcvalencia9]

I agree with GLC try zero filling your HDD. and then partition, reinstall the OS you want.

[Ob1]

i tried running the recovery console and when it boots into the recovery console, it pauses for a few seconds and then states that the path or file specified is not valid and then shows C:\
no commands work in the recovery console.
thnx for the help guys, keep the suggestions coming......

[rcvalencia9]

Do you have a windows 98 boot disk? Run Fdisk from the floppy and see if what's the active partition. Set C:\ as your active partition if its not. Maybe the active partion changed when you tried to install windows 2003 server.

[macko72]

Maybe this article will help you: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=315335&sd=RMVP

[Ob1]

thnx for the tips and suggestions. im gonna try them tonight after work. ill get back to ya with the results or any further problems i run into tonight.

[Ob1]

alright guys, i fixed my HDD. i looked in my bios and found out that my hdd was a maxtor harddrive. i went to there website and downloaded some utlities, burned them onto a disk, and ran them on my busted pc. looks like it zero'd out the hd, cause i put my OS disk in the cd rom and it recognized it and installed and now im rockin and rolling. just wanted to say thnx to everyone who posted on the forum to help me with this problem. u guys rock!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!