Help me before I go mad - Please !!

I have (almost) completely screwed my new Inspiron 6400- and no I didn’t make a recovery disk as I don’t have a floppy drive. I needed to use Win2k for an up and coming course and tried to load it onto my XP-MCE system. I loaded Partition Magic 8, created a new partition and followed the instructions – as always things don’t always go according to plan. I loaded Win2k and when I rebooted it failed. After much fiddling around, looking through threads etc. this is where I am before I completely blitz the whole thing.

I can get to the Ghost component and when I asked it to restore to original Dell setting it does the deed and tried repairing with original XP set up disks but I get an error message of [xldr] ATA. I have looked on threads but am none the wiser. Can anyone provide a steer on next steps. Having looked at the system, this is the current configuration:

C: BootMagic
D: No label but it has Windows files
E: Backup (Norton Ghost Point Storage but not sure if there are any files in here but I did ask for a complete backup as soon as I received the inpsiron)
F: XP-MCE-SP2-ENG
G: No label lots of $NtUninstallxxx files
H: No label

Please help or if not do I repartition or just reload the OS. drivers and other progs etc?

Thanks

Thanks for the advice

zakaluka2

Many thanks for the advice. I'll see what results today's efforts can bring to resolve my issue before I reformat and reload.

I am going on an introduction to ethical hacking and they advise that all of the course tools will work under Win2k some will not work under XP. They were unsure if vmware would work so I tried to load a full copy of Win2k and dual boot.

Regards