Well I think I am getting somewhe I put the drive into a desktop and
formatted it using Partition Manager. It WAS true that the XP installation
process couldnt find a drive to format by itself, which is a bit surprising.

It then goes easily into the M700 (on which as I say I have successfully
installed XP before as an exercise in seeing whether another drive was
working: I should have held on to that drive!!) and XP installs easily but
the whole process stops at first reboot with the message NTLDR is missing

Apparently (googling it) this means that you have to boot off a Windows 98
floppy (!) and do a SYS C: Amazingly this is supposed to work on XP
installations (as well as 2000 ones)

But it doesnt on mine, I just receive the error message that SYS cant find a
system in the place where it is supposed to look which is pretty unusual as
XP's installation should only be able to put it in one place! But redoing
this procedure renders no improvement and nor does formatting the FAT32
drive onto which I am doing the install as an NTFS drive. Still the same
error message. But amazingly, booting off a floppy does show that the
install process had put all the proper files in the proper place in the
windows directory. I know that this drive has errors on it but they are
comparatively minuscule and shouldnt effect

Nor does recovery console or the repair MBR or repair BOOT utilities there
help. I have definitely seen that "CAN'T FIND NTLDR" before and wonder what
I can be doing wrong?

I am running out of ideas now and am wondering if the drive is faulty.