Newbnew, you dont need to have the recovery disks. An XP or Vista Installation CD will work as long as you have a License key. Which if it came with the XP OS, should have a Windows XP Pro OEM license key on the case somewhere. Either the top or side panels....and sometimes the back of the case.
Now you need to boot of the CD....not the hard drives...and not the recovery disks. You may need to go into the Gateway's bios and set the boot order to boot off the CD before the hard drive. Also if the System doesnt see Sata hard drives you may be able to go to the bios and change the way the system see's the hard drive. Sometimes you can default the Sata drive to make it be seen as an IDE. You will need to change the bios Sata controllers to say Legacy IDE or AHCI needs to be turned off I believe...or maybe it was on...I dont quite remember...
But yes, you should be able to CLEAN Boot to a Windows Cd, and install from there.
