97catintenn

my laptop is:

Inspiron 1150

What's it mean when your laptop powers up but gives an error that reads
Hard disk read failure
No bootable devices...

and then waits for me to do something? Which I did. I got out my xp home cd and reformatted the harddrive, installed xp home again, and it went thru the most of the writting successfully. It reconized my 30gig HD and partitioned it, also installed windows on it for some 30mins... and then we comes time to restart, it claims HD Failure again.

I'm pretty sure my HD is okay, and now I'm leaning toward the bios. If I knew which bios to download and flash with I could try that, but I dont. Dell needs a stupid number off the bottom of the laptop to figure out what system i have, and those numbers are completely worn off.

What do you guys think the problem is? Am I waay off track here or what? Anybody know of a one size bios that fixes all dell inspirons?