What I meant by a Vista machine is a pc with Vista installed.
The XP cd does not say anything about SP2 on the disk. So I am assuming pre -SP2. Would it say if it was on the disk or just the package it came in? I do not have the original packaging.
I googled the problem and alot of the solutions I found require to boot into the Windows Recovery Console. But I can't get there because of the error message. It does not let me boot off the cd at all.