no bootable device! seemed to have broken moms computer

Hi, i have had a great day of sort of solving one problem and creating a gigantic one. I have a hp pavillion a520n running windows 2000(service pack 4). I had an external hard drive that died on me, turned into a RAW drive or something. So i took it outta the case and inserted it as a slave drive(have built a computer before so i know the ins and outs).I managed to recover all the data, yet failed at trying to reformat the drive. I found a program that would help me but it didnt give my drives right size(gave a 137 gb size) and said if the drive was bigger than that then i shouldnt proceed and should check the LBA settings. I changed the 48bitLBA settings according to the windows help center and checked the bios which displayed my drive correctly as 320 gb. Still didnt work. So i checked if i needed IDE ata/atapi driver updates, which i did. When i looked into the device manager under the ide drivers, the computer restarted and gave me different error messages: a master boot record error and an i/o disk error.
I researched on the internet and used a windows xp disk to use the recovery console and fix the master boot record. That didnt seem to work, so i opened up the computer and took out the newly placed hard drive, checked all the cables, jumpers, and bios. Everything was fine and the bios recognized the hard drive still. Now i just get an error message that says reboot and select proper boot device. I went into the recovery console again and noticed that when it displays C, it displays a message before that says the path or file specified is not valid, as if the drive has dissapeared or been erased or something??I can access the other drives(cd and floppy) in recovery console. So the question is...why isnt there a bootable device?? does anyone know a solution that doesnt end in reinstall windows? The computer broke down a few months ago and the hard drive got wiped somehow and the power supply was replaced. Its my moms computer, so its mighty frustrating that this has happend

 

Reinstall...

If your mom's data is safe, then just reinstall the OS...instead of spending a lot of wated time trying to find a solution. Besides, off a fresh install Windows runs very fast (at least for a little while...)