Interesting side note Re: ntloader missing....help!

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Thanks to everyone for your help..we got it working thanks to you all. 
 
On a side note, during all this trouble I took the disc to my house to see if it would boot on  my computer which it did.  I exited out of the install program and rebooted.  when I attempted to reboot, MY computer gave me the same ntloader error.  Does the install disc automatically overwrite the boot info as soon as it starts running before you even tell it ot install, or repair windows?  The thing that semed to work for me was to change the bios to look at the HDD first then the CD for bootup.  When I changed it back to CD I got the error again.  Then I set it to load failsafe and it worked with it set to boot from CD first.  Weird, huh?
 
 
 
Ok this is involved but I want to thank you in advance for reading this post and congratulations if you actually understand it.
 
My friend has this OLD computer that he wanted to put XP on.  He got some new memory and a new HDD.  IT has 98 on it right now but it has been getting very buggy to the point of changing settings every time he boots up hence the desire for XP
 
Anyway, we wanted to put XP on the newer, faster drive and then move over his important files to it then format and use the old one for extra storage.  I hope all this sounds reasonable so far.
 
We did just that.  We booted up to 98, stuck in the XP disk.  (before you ask his BIOS doesn't support booting to the XP disk)  The XP screen came up asking what we wanted to do, so we told it to format the new HDD to NTFS and then load XP on it, which it did.
 
After everything was over and it had us reboot and XP was up and running on the new drive, we switched the cable n the drive so the XP drive would be the master and the 98 drive would be the slave.
 
When we attempted to reboot, it almost immediately came up with a message that said NTLOADER missing then I think, Abort, Retry, Fail  on the next line below.  Sorry if these details are not right, I'm home now and can't see exactly what his computer said verbatim.
 
Oh, I just remembered...we had previously tried to load 98 on the new drive but had to abort when he realized he left his certificate at the ex-wife's house.  For some reason it wouldn't boot to the XP disk although it did for the 98 disk.
 
So when we switched the cables back, on bootup we got a screen asking which OS to boot to.  I'm assuming it was seeing the aborted 98 setup and the successful XP setup on the same disk, or either it could be seeing the 98 on the old disk and the XP on the new one....I dunno which it is.  We booted to XP and it was fine.
 
SO  my question is what do we need to do to get the new drive to boot up without giving this NTLOADER error?  I hope I've given enough info without being too long-winded.  TIA for anyone choosing to respond.
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