XP doesn’t recognize drive at boot-up

Hello,
I just recent added a Western Digital 250 gb internal hard drive to my Dell 8300 (XP SP2 with Pentium 4 and 2 GB RAM) at work, and now when I try to start it, it goes to a black screen, beeps twice, and tells me it can’t read the primary hard drive (or something similar…I’m not at the PC right now). It then tells me to hit F1 to continue (which it does), or F2 to enter the boot menu…I replaces the 40-pin cable, but to no avail…is it a case of the BIOS battery being low, or is the boot sequence out of whack? It never did that before I changed the drive….
Thanks,
Rob
(PS…this site is GREAT!)