Windows XP Troubleshooting

I may have a new computer soon. I'm working right now on a hand-me down computer that doesn't load anything correctly from the boot. The computer will power on, but nothing shows up on the menu after the keyboard lights blink temporarily.

Though I kind of knew how to troubleshoot stuff like this already (A+ Certified), I found an article entitled 10 things you can do when Windows XP won't boot that I was using for reference. It's a pretty good article for beginners, but it lacks some good suggestions on what to do next when a certain tip doesn't pan out.

And wouldn't you know it, I'm stuck on the very first tip. I'm trying to make a decent boot disk on my current working system, but testing it has shown that it does seem to work on the same system it was created on. I get a disk I/O error. Reading the disk from Windows looks fine, so...

I'll post more details about this later, if there is time.