Floppy Disk won't recognize any form of boot disk

[naanders]

My computer is a Dell Latitude L400 laptop. The floppy drive and CD Rom are external drives that plug into the laptop.

I am having a problem where I can't login to Windows XP because of the following message:
stop: c0000218 {registry file failure}
the registry cannot load the hive (file):
\systemroot\system32\config\software
or its log or alternative.
it is corrupt.

HOWEVER, the problem is that while I would LIKE to recover my data from this system, I can't get the floppy drive to respond!!!

When I put the Win 98/ME boot disk, Windows XP boot disk, or a utility disk (HDD or other) and start the system up all that I get is:

Disk I/O Error
Replace the disk, and then press any key

When I put the Windows 2000 boot disk in, I get this:

Boot: I/O error reading disk
Please insert another disk

*** Please provide any help with resolving this as I can't do anything with it now... thanks in advance!

History:
- I bought this system a year ago and it was running Windows 2000. I installed XP (using boot floppies and Windows XP Professional CD).
- The floppy has always worked fine until now.