It seems I cannot get C:\ to be a bootable drive. It always looks at the floppy drive for boot.ini, and if I turn off floppy in bios, it just says ntldr is missing.

Hello Elk1007 and Welcome Back!

It sounds like your System Volume Information file is corrupted. Would you be willing to use the Recovery Console or would you prefer something else? There are many options...

*JM*

Well I can't run any cd's. The only working floppy drive I have is on the actual laptop, so the best I could do is put a utility on the hard drive and then copy it to A:\, or run it from the hard drive itself.

Anything like that?
Please walk me through this.

Also, isn't system volume information part of system restore?
I just installed XP and it does the first reboot, and then I get a ntldr is missing message, unless a floppy points to C:\$win_nt$~.bt\bootsect.dat, then I get the 'could not find <windows directory>/system32/hal.dll' message.

Ugggggh this is frustrating.