<human>: Can you condense the text into a few key points?

I am currently trying to reformat a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop. It originally came installed with Windows Vista, but it malfunctioned a LOT (had issues with the cursor that Dell acknowledged as a hardware problem but refuses to do anything about) so I wiped it and installed Ubuntu Karmic Koala on it, and it ran great. Now I have to give it back to my mom, and she can't operate it unless it has some sort of Windows on it. I *thought* she had all the recovery CDs for it, but that's proven to be wrong. I currently have a valid Windows XP disc, but I can't even install that because it's not recognizing the harddrive during the install.

I changed the drive from SATA to ATA, and the XP setup recognized the drive, stated it needed NTSF formatting, spends close to an hour formatting the drive, then produces the "drive cannot be formatted" error, and stops recognizing the harddrive. 

I am reasonably certain that I need a harddisk drivers CD that can run in BIOS, but I don't have one/don't know where to download one to burn it. The only thing I can think of now is to try the install with an actual Vista recovery CD or full OS CD, but I don't have either of those. I'd be happy to pay to download a recovery CD so that I could get this done without having to wait for one to be shipped to be, but I'm having issues finding that too.

Does anyone have any advice/suggestions/helpful links for me? I'm really stumped at this point and any help would be appreciated!
<bot>: Trying to reformat Dell Inspiron 1525 back to original Windows Vista OS without recovery CD. Failing miserably and in need of assistance.