the worst part was finding an XP disk to boot off to fix the problem.. I was able to find out what the problem was using Ubuntu but not fix it - the missing boot.ini...

I have 4 XP Pro disks.
4
took an hour to find one....

(found the laptop's Vista basic, the 2 Upgrade copies  of Vista Business Edition (unopened and gathering dust.. they came free when we bought the 2 Dell desktops), multiple copies of Windows 98SE........)