XP Installation Loop

Interesting problem that has me stumped...

I was attempting to add a second OS to my machine, I am currently running Vista on a 1TB sata drive. I had 2 partitions, the first was my OS and programs, at 120g partition, and then 880g partition for data. I decided vista was too much of a memory hog, so I then shrunk the 880g partition and made a 120g partition to add a dual boot of Windows XP.

Everything seemed to be going fine, XP asked which partition to install on, I selected the unformated 120g, copied files, then it reset. Looped back to format/copy files, reset, etc. I decided to cut my losses and try to recover with my Vista cd, but alas, It didnt recognize my hard drive.

I now have tried 2 different windows XP discs (one with SP1 one so old it has no SP), my vista disk, and 2 different hard drives, my 1tb Sata and a 160g EIDE (which is unbelievably slow roughly 90 minutes to format / copy xp) But regardless it just keeps looping.

My instinct is that my boot priorities are wrong, so I went in:
#1) FDD
#2) Hard Drive
#3) DVD Drive

Also I tried with both hard drives in with different priorities, once with the EIDE as primary then once with SATA as primary, everything still loops.

ALSO, (if you can believe it), I booted up with 2 different LINUX OSes (Fedora/Ubuntu) but was unable to get any decent NTFS recognition software working to see whats up with my drives. I have 2 new SATA drives I plan to raid when they arrive in the next day or two, but would love to get these old 2 working and hopefully recovering the 300+ Gigs of info I have on the TB drive before hand, If it is irrecoverably lost, I will live, but it consists of several years worth of documents/pictures/movies/software/etc that I would rather not lose...

Any ideas for recovery / installation / or general advice?

 

I actually just finished that... The odd thing is that that worked but the F6 during boot and using a floppy didn't. Its fixed now and I have a lovely SP3 slipstream with about 500k drivers on it now.