Normally HP/Compaq have all of the drivers on their Restore CD or on a separate partition on the hard drive. As you do not have the Restore CD from you friend and it does not appear that you have a partition with what you need you will need to find out exactly what hardware you have on the computer.

Identify the make and model numbers of your hardware. Belarc Adviser is very good at this and I suggest you download and run it.

Once you have identified the hardware go to the HP/Compaq site and download the drivers that you need to a safe place.

Once you have done the above you will be ready to do a fresh install of Windows. As to that second HD, you can keep it hooked in while you install XP to your main drive. Just make sure that you install XP to the correct drive that you want. If you want, you can also disconnect the ribbon cable from the second HD while you do the fresh install of XP. When you are finished just reattach the cable and XP should recognize it.

Please note that the OEM XP disk you are using may not work as it is supposed to be tied to the machine it came with. You should also note that not having your own copy of XP is waiting for trouble as you will need the XP disk for installing certain software or for just doing repairs when Windows craps out on you. You can still buy XP on the internet (Newegg, ebay, etc...). As an aside, you may also want to create a dual boot with Ubuntu Linux so that you can still have a viable computer when XP goes south and you have no XP CD to fix Windows.

When doing a fresh install of XP it will reformat your HD that you are installing to. I suggest using NTFS instead of FAT32 when you format.

Once everything is installed you can then install the drivers that are needed for your hardware which you had downloaded before.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

Doc