[Hampshire] Re installing windows XP on a dual boot pc

I have a PC (6 months old) which dual boots windows XP with Ubuntu which
is used by the family. My son switched off the power before Windows shut
down and it doesn't boot anymore. Ubuntu is unaffected and so I don't
believe that any hardware has failed.

My main gripe is with the so called "recovery console" which should have
been the path to recovery. However it refused to start. This is
apparently due to the absence of SATA drivers which can helpfully be
fixed by putting them on to a floppy disk - if I had a disk drive.

Thanks to Ubuntu, I have all the data and I was happy to re-install XP
but when I tried that, setup just hung "looking for previous windows
versions". To verify that these problems were linked to the Sata
drivers, I tried an old IDE disk with a win2k partition which was found
both by recovery console and setup within a few seconds. It makes me
angry that a company with the resources of Microsoft do not have better
tools and I am convinced that this is deliberate.

During the struggle I came across ntsfix which unfortunately wasn't a
substitute for chkdsk but it reset XP's log which triggered chkdsk
when XP was rebooted. Unfortunately the screen went blank at the end so
I don't know the results.

Can anybody advise on what to do next? I installed XP on the blank SATA
disk when it was new without a problem and do not understand why setup
cannot do it again or at least give a sensible reason. I would prefer to
leave Ubuntu undisturbed and if possible the existing windows data. I am
not even confident that re formatting the whole drive would allow me to
reinstall.

Thanks


Roger