I managed to get it done, no thanks to Dell. Problem solved.
I think I have finally figured out the proper installation sequence to restore my operating system. I made the mistake of thinking all I had to do to restore the operating system was to use the operating system disk. The OS installed succesfully but the dvd drive won't work. I tried installing MediaDirect, but it says it's already installed. Looking at the partitions on the hard drive I see 4 partitions, -:  Partition (P) 1 [FAT]  47MB,  C: P2 [NTFS]  108643MB, D:P4 [UNKNOWN], 2047MB, F: P3 [FAT32] 3734MB. I'm Thinking I need to delete all these partitions and start over with first the MediaDirect cd, then the windows cd. Is this the correct procedure? I think it is also going to ask me what size to make the partitions. Should I just use these values? 108643MB for the os and it will do it's own allocating for whatever other partitions it creates?
Reinstalling Dell MediaDirect 3 and Win xp on Inspiron E1505