WinXP hard disk problems

Well, after deleting the wrong partition (which happened to be my other hard drive, which had to be the one with all my files backed up) after formatting my hard drive, i now cannot even install Windows. I did this trying to re-install windows xp, and now when i try to install it to the newly formatted NFTS hard drive (not quick format, the one that takes an hour) it copies all the files, reboots, and gives me a "A disk read error has occurred. Press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to reboot"

I've googled this a lot, but haven't found anything having to do with win xp setup. nothing was wrong before i did this.
can anyone help me out? i really need to get to installng win xp for work!! thanks.

happy new year,

have you checked the bios to see if it is booting to the hard drive that you want and not the cd-rom . is there another partition?
is it a pata or sata drive? verify what its booting too if you havent done this already

just things that come to mind

Yes, I've actually manually selected the HD every time the installation reboots. There was a PATA drive, but i took it out. it's on a SATA drive. around 50 gigs is partitioned....i'm going to try to get whatever i can off of that drive, becuase all of my other important info got deleted. Let me guess I have to delete that partition too? oh man.... It's a sata drive, though.

and happy new year to you too!

please, if anyone could help me out. i'd love to start installin this!

SATA, did you do the F6 and feed the SATA drivers when it asked for SCSI drivers [ which windows sees SATA as being].

And seeing you have XP, I hope you have a floppy drive so you can do it.

Just did, and it doesn't see my drive."setup was unable to load support for the mass storage device you specified" then it says it'll load support for the following <none>. and I don't have a disk for a sata drive...argh what to do.

EDIT: bios see's the drive.


EDIT 2: I just tried again and now it's saying "Setup cannot determine the type of computer you have..." then it asks me to choose between "Standard pc with c-step i486" or "other"