kinda OT but..."Type path to command interpreter"?

ahhh I wanna kill myself....hey all...I'm the guy below that built the
system for a surveillance system, with a P4P800-e board, some of you
responded to a problem I had.

Now I have another...lol....I did a system restore in winME to a few days
ago from today (the 27th in the restore calender, because I made some
changes I wanted to undo) and rebooted: got stopped cold with a "type path
to command interpreter eg: c:\windows\command.com" error...thats bad
news....system wont boot: its not surveilling the store, no video in case of
robbery or something...a distinct possiblity in my town....lol...system is
just staring at me with a C:\ on its face.

so, I start the troubleshooting...the floppy drive I threw in was original
equipment (I used as much as I could from the old system when I built the
new one for him) and now I find it dont work...figures. I tried to use a
winMe boot floppy to run SYS C: command...cant do that.

There are 2 maxtor drives in the an 80 gig, and a 160 gig. The 160 gig is
the system drive with winME and all the surveillance software (which wont
run on 2K or XP unless upgrading for 50000 bazillion dollars) and stuff on
it. I open the system up out of curiosity, disconnect the slave drive:
system boots up no prob....

Plug slave back in: "type path to command interpreter eg:
c:\windows\command.com"

Repeat several times to confirm...

So, with slave drive disconnected, system works..but surveillance software
wants that drive so it can store the 20 meg .avi files it creates every 30
seconds, and without it, the software wont initialize...I dont quite
understand all that, but its proprietary so vodka kills the urge to really
learn.....

what are my options....take slave out, put in diff machine and reformat?

buy new floppy drive? (neither machine on my home network have floppies, cuz
they have bootable USB CD's)

looking for a different perspective here.....thanks for any assistance....