I'm not good at any of this stuff, so a kind hand would be appreciated. I want to make a bootable dvd using Bart's from my IBM cd's. They started in a partition and have now been copied onto 1 rescue/recovery cd and 5 product recovery cd's. I have no idea of what to copy,use,etc. This machine didn't come with a traditional installation cd for Windows XP. Can anyone give some rather detailed guidance. Thanks.

Recovery CD's are "bad beasts" .

See if with the info in these threads you can "tame" them :
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=16381
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=19109

If you have somewhere a \I386 directory or however a bunch of files (thousands) with the last letter of the extension an underscore, such as .dl_, .ex_, etc. with some patience and time you should be able to re-create an install CD (which is the base for making a PE).

jaclaz