Dell Inspiron 1525 Will Not Reformat Using Windows XP

tired searching through the forums for this problem but couldn't find it anywhere ....

so i'll go ahead and post and hopefully someone can help me ...

I have a dell inspiron 1525 laptop ..... came with windows xp installed on it ....

I have to use windows xp to be able to use a certain piece of software for work ....

I have a windows xp disk that i have used on many machines to reformat them before so i know this cd works ...
I place the disk inside of the laptop to reformat it and load windows xp onto the machine ... setup loads like usual ... everything loads up then i accept the license agreement for windows xp ... right after this is where i choose what drive to install windows xp on .... but the problem is that it doesn't show a drive at ALL .... now if i place the drive inside of another machine and load windows xp onto the hard drive then place it inside the machine .. everything works fine .... but for some reason it won't load up the drive on that machine .... someone has told me that i need to download the sata drivers from dell directly .... but ... the sata drivers are in exe format ... they don't have the .inf file which i'm pretty sure is what i need to be able to load it during windows xp setup ... not sure though ... PLEASE SOMEONE HELP