Inspiron 9400 Setup Hiccup

After taking delivery of my new Inspiron 9400, I repaved the hard drive and began setting up the OS just the way I like it.  I was mindlessly going through the Dell disks reinstalling all the drivers and apps that looked interesting, when suddenly the laptop became unbootable - every time Windows started an error came up saying "autochk program not found", and an endless re-boot cycle ensued.  I'd modified boot.ini to get rid of the old XP Home settings, and though I'd stuffed something up.  After repaving and starting again, I came to install Dell MediaDirect - it had a few errors during install about drive X not being found (which I guess is one of the hidden Dell partitions I deleted.)  After I tried to reboot, same problem again.  After the third repave, old Dell MediaDirect didn't get a look in.