Hi Jpread988,
Sorry to heard about the issue that you are having. If the replacement drive that you purchased for your laptop is larger than your older original drive, make sure that your laptop can support the new drives capacity. Computers have a limit of how large of a drive they can support based on when they were manufactured. You may need to contact Dell to find out the limitation or see if there is a BIOS update for your laptop that can help.
Also, you may need a pre-OS driver in order for Windows to detect the drive. This driver is installed before Windows so that Windows can detect the drive. I included a link to the drivers page for your laptop. Hopefully, one of the Intel Matrix Storage Manager drivers will work under the “Serial ATA” section. These drivers are typically installed by pressing F1 during the start of the Windows installation. Then you need to have the driver on a floppy disk.
Dell Inspiron 1545 drivers
http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/product-support/product/inspiron-1545/drivers
Hope this helps
