Question : Dell Latitude D505

Recently upgraded to a 320gb hard drive.  Cloned the original 30gb drive.  Everything ran perfectly for several months.  Applied a windows update and everything went to hell.  I decided to back up all my data, and that was successful.  Popped an XP Pro Disc in (not the original Dell) Formatted the drive.  The system reboots and goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor.  On pressing control alt del the system reboots instantly.  I have tried to format the drive multiple times.  Do I need to have the original Dell disc to install the a fresh copy of windows?  I am at a loss here.  Any help would be much appreciated.  Oh and the Dell diagnostics finishes without any problems.  One thing it did say is that the original Dell system partition has been removed.  I have removed system partitions in the past without any problems.  Any ideas here?

Answer : Dell Latitude D505

You say you reformatted.

So did you go through the Windows XP set up blue screens and then delete all the existing partitions, then create a new partition using all the space and then format and continue set up?