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I got it fixed. For anyone who might search in the future, here's what Ihad to do.
I went and got a small IDE HDD, installed XP on it. Once I could boot the computer that way, I put my corrupted drive in an external drive that connected to the computer via USB.
(I tried to install the SATA drive as a secondary, thinking I could possible copy the missing SYSTEM files from the working OS on the new HDD, but the computer kept choosing the SATA drive as master, no matter how I set it.)
Reboot, f2, run WIndows Install disk. Choose repair ('r'). Chose the corrupted disk, that was now being detected via USB from the external drive.
At the command prompt, I did "chkdsk /p" - it took about an hour.
Reinstalled everything to the original setup, turned the pig on, and took a (big) shot of chilled Patron SilverŪ for luck.
Thankfully, Patron SilverŪ is a great luck enhancer, because I'm good as new now. Thanks for the help everyone :D
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