win 2000 to xp

I have a compaq E700 laptop that I just bought. The Floppy drive, cd, worked fine. It had win 2000 on it, and it worked fine. But w2000 does not have a SYSTEM RESTORE prog.  Win XP does and I need that prog. So I attempted to load xp over W2000 as a dual operating system. MY laptop has a 13.5 gig hd and about 190,000 mb of memory.  The first time I did it win xp was a bad load. so I tried again and made a mistake of formatting the hd with ntsf. The first time I did not.

Needeless to say , now I have absolutely NOTHING.

Each time I try to load xp, now on the 10 th try, I get a very quick flashing note and then the puter begins to reinstall. This is the vicious circle that I am now facing. 

The best I can read the flashed note is as follows.
"a write operation in an attempt..... to complete.....after .... the API"
the ..... = missing words. It flashes to fast and connot be read.

The second problem.

After initializing the f 10 button to get to the bios, I changed the boot sequence from Hard drive to both the cd and the floppy.

I have a beautiful floppy which has on it means to fdisk, format and load to the c drive the initial startup progs. Now I cannot get to the floppy. I get an error code "Remove all media and click any key to continue.

I have original win 95, win98, win98s and xp cd's. I do not have win 2000.

I just tried to format, using the xp cd to non ntsf, hoping I might be able to install win 95 or 98. That also failed.

Now I am staring at a black useless laptop. I NEED HELP>!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am wondering what causes youy to need the system restore prog?

If win 2000 works fine, then what's the problem? If you're attempting to install win XP just to use system restore hoping to recover win 2000 or osmething like that, it most likely won't work.

If your Windows 98 boot disk isn't working properly download one from http://www.bootdisk.com and then try running fdisk and then format with FAT32.
It may be the Hard Drive that has died, or a bad partition table.

Let me know how it goes.

here's an idea.

try installing linux onto your laptop. Linux is free to download and install. Then once you have verified that linux is all working and good ....

Then try your windows cd again to see if it will format your computer, removing linux and leaving you with windows.

Just an idea, but if Linux works, at least you'll still have access to internet and other basics while you attempt to get windows back to your laptop.