yeah this i already tried i compleatly wiped the hd so nothing was even on it but i think that it might be the harddrive itself that it finally had died so i gonna just give up on it and see if my friend will buy a new HD

No he said xp can't SEE his hard drive at all. that means it is a XP driver issue.

So he needs to get the driver from gateway (cringe) and some how f6 it?

The driver in for xp to see the ide-channel and then the drive.

He needs IDE-drivers not hard disk drivers. question is, how does he get it in with no floppy? does he have a usb floppy disk so xp can see it?

BTW- iv'e installed xp sp1 and sp2 with no problems having existing ext2/3 partitions.
usually it just complains about lack of free space and which if not all partitions to delete.
There has to be a gateway model somewhere guy... find it and we can help you.

stop partitioning/reformatting your hard drive, please, it has nothing to do with the problem. you just make the drive confused to the point it no longer boots/works.

I promise to check back tomorrow to finish helping with this.
-note xp has built in usb/floppy drivers! unless you have some hacked/slimmed down version of XP. ie; certain drivers removed?.. do you have the gateway recovery cd?

--note 2; run the newer liveCD you can lspci for us and post it so we can find the driver for you? =:< -eman

It's not a bad hard drive! don't give up on it! If linux can SEE it, that means it's good.
think of xp as an old linux or even win95 on newer hardware! you just need the driver! *(NO money required!). Don't Give Up!

Can you try another windows CD. I think perhaps the CD has some damage and it did not load proper drivers.