I had the same problem with mine, noone here would help me, so I just threw my computer in the ditch, some bum came and got it, and he fixed it too, but did not give it back to me. What you might need to do, is go into the BIOS change the boot order so that the cd-rom will boot first, and then save changes, put the Reinstallation CD Microsoft windows XP home edition, including service pack 2, in the cd drive, and restart the computer. Then what will happen next is that the system will boot off the cd, and from that point on, you can reinstall windows. But be warned if you do this then what will happen is your hard drive will be formatted, as this is how recovery disc’s work, delete all your information so that it can start over and reinstall fresh. If you had a OEM copy of XP then you would be able to reinstall without deleting. I believe on a Dell you press F10 to get in the BIOS, but if that is not right try F2. I believe you can avoid all this by simply performing a repair on the drive. To try a repair look here

1. Insert the Windows XP bootable CD into the computer.
2. When prompted to press any key to boot from the CD, press any key.
3. Once in the Windows XP setup menu press the "R" key to repair Windows.
4. Log into your Windows installation by pressing the "1" key and pressing enter.
5. You will then be prompted for your administrator password, enter that password.
6. Copy the below two files to the root directory of the primary hard disk. In the below example we are copying these files from the CD-ROM drive letter "E". This letter may be different on your computer.

copy e:\i386\ntldr c:\
copy e:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\
7. Once both of these files have been successfully copied, remove the CD from the computer and reboot

This information was provided by John Kazer, my programmer.