Ok I finally got it to start its process but it got in a loop and just would not move on to xp booting from the HDD. So I put in an old windows 98se floppy and booted and ran fdisk and deleted the primary partition. I tried it again and it ran the restore process mostly I think from restore partition because it only asked for disc one of the three. I think now I can get things back to normal after I install drivers for the scanner and printer and other stuff.
I wanted to try a what if the HDD went bad so I swapped it for a 10 GB HDD and started the restore process. It ran and this time asked for all three disks. But when it was time to make the primary partition and install xp from the restore partition I believe it made and loaded while it asked for the three cds. Well when it got to that it looped and told me it could not. Now at the beginning it would have been nice or when it error to tell me why. Is 10 GB not a big enough HDD? The original drive was in the low 80 GBs
Additional question is how big a HDD would it need or am I seeing another problem using an HDD not originally OEM equipment?