The 6in1 does not contain any of those virtual floppies, those came in later versions.
If you can't run chkdsk, your going to need to put the drive in as slave to a working system and try to recover your stuff that way. If you don't have another working system maybe you have another drive you can install XP onto. Sounds like you might need a data recovery program as well.
You said:
When I boot from CD and and get to the prompt for Partition to install, it says C: with Everything free.
If setup is telling you the partition is empty (Everything free), there must be something wrong with the MFT or FAT table.
Best of luck popeye,
Dave