Trying to load operating system lindows and get LI but worked before.

I have this new computer (well it is my friends) and I swapped out the
old harddrive and put it in (this harddrive had xp) I got it working
we had to do a repair and reactivated. Ok then I use the lindows hard
drive as a slave --set it to slave.
it showed up in the bios, as system boots, and everywhere but the xp
explorer interface (meaning it showed up in systems)
ok..
so I switched the ribbon cables around.. so the xp and cd-where on the
same cable and had the slave on it own cable.(I moved the jumper to
master on the lindow hd (her husband is suppose to be a computer guru
and I had him on the phone -(he is out of town) and he was walking me
through all this) now that didn't work

Now the xp say's load operating system. I tryed to do a repair and
it would boot from the cd and when it calls for a reboot (as windows
does it would say erroor load operating system
and the other drive that is lindows goes to LI

I took out the xp drive I didn't want to mess with that because I took
the computer home.
so I am working now with just the lindows that came with the computer.

I fdisk/mbr
I got http://www.toms.net/rb/ and loaded this little program and did a
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

I completely cleared out the MBR
and reloaded the lindows and still the LI

so I did a the step above to clear out the mbr

and put the hard drive in my machine and the lindows loaded and
started right up.
I put it back in the other machine and I get the LI
again..
does anyone know what is going on and how do I fix this?

Thank you
Naomi