soybean is right.
If you want to move on, forget Windows XP.
Now here is some information you may want to know. For those people who have to have XP on a machine that has Window 7 or 8 and just one hard drive there is a way that works.
XP must be installed first. Ignore people who tell you other wise. Just do it that way until you understand what is going on with he Windows boot thing. Later, ypou can make your one exception rules.
After installing both Windows XP and the next Windows OS, either 7 or 8, you must make a image backup of the partitions.
If the Windows XP install goes bad, you have to use the partition recovery to recover just the XP partition only without changing the boot information. I stress this only because at least one tool I know about wants to put the boot information back to the standard XP boot method. That would destroy the Windows 7 or 8 boot information. And no, you can not fix it with boot.ini options.
The better alternative is to have two serrate, physical boot devices.
Here is a phrase for a search on either Bing, Google or Yahoo.
boot XP from a flash drive
