What u actually need my friend is a regular windows bootable cd not some bad copy . U don't need any lifeguard or whatever utility no matter how your hdd is partition or formated or whatever file system u have

All Xp cds are bootable unless they are defective

for older versions of windows that were not bootable u have to create a bottable flopy and modify config.sys and autoexec.bat to initialize the cdrom (ex http://falcon.jmu.edu/~jarvislb/utils/boot_cd.html) but for xp is not the case