Various "customize" And "advanced" Tabs On The Screen?

I had windows XP, and recently decided to upgrade to 7, skipping Vista. I have all my important files backed up, and I intend to reformat the hard drive and start fresh. I put in the Windows 7 disk, clicked through the various "customize" and "advanced" tabs on the screen where I select a drive to install to, selected the drive I wanted, and hit "format", and verified that I really meant to do that. Nothing appeared to be happening, so I got up and made some lunch, and when I came back nothing still appeared to be happening. I assumed that it might format the drive during the next step. I am still not clear whether this is the case or not.

I selected the drive and proceeded with the installation. It said it was copying the files from the disk, then expanding the files, but it remained at 0% files expanded for several minutes before informing me that the files were missing, and the installation could not continue. It took me back to the first screen, and I tried all the prior steps again, twice, both with and without selecting format and had identical results. I decided to restart and try again, which I did by closing the installation window and verifying the restart, only to have more identical results.

Frustrated, I decided to simply upgrade the XP installation to 7 and then manually delete the chaff from the HDD when the process was finished. I restarted again, this time selecting upgrade from the menu, where it informed me that I had to open this option while running my previous version of Windows. I restarted yet again, this time not booting from the DVD, and saw "BOOTMGR is missing, Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart".Getting pretty sick of restarting repeatedly and getting nowhere (it keeps going downhill from here), I nonetheless tried again, to be greeted with the same message. I finally resorted to firing up my trusty Compaq laptop slab from 2001 (where I am writing this right now) and Googling the error, and came up with two possible fixes to try.Rebooting to the DVD, I selected "repair your computer" instead of install, but the list of existing operating systems was empty. I hit "use recovery tools (yadda yada)" anyway, opened the terminal, and tried startup repair, which said it could not fix my problem. Then, I opened the terminal and tried bootrec.exe /fixboot (successful), bootrec.exe /fixmbr (successful), and bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd (0 windows installations identified). Restarted, got same error. Thinking that the empty existing operating systems list and the rebuildbcd message meant that something was wrong with my XP install now, I dug out my dusty old XP disk and tried to use it to repair or reformat the drive in a desperate bid to regain some usefulness from my machine.

It BSoD'd before geting to any options, and continues to do so if I restart and try again.So, to recap:Can't finish windows 7 installation, it can't find the files it just copied.Can't open previous XP installation, it can't find the bootmgr.Can't upgrade XP to 7, it requires me to be in XP first.Can't fix the bootmgr, it doesn't think the XP install is there.Can't install fresh XP, it BSoDs.Can't do anything with my computer anymore, see above.