They're Coming After Your Holidays...
News4 mins ago
No best answer has yet been selected by pigface. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.Do you have the original Windows XP CD? If so you can boot up using that (provided your system BIOS has 'Boot From CD' enabled) and attempt a repair.
Whoever said that a startup disk is no longer required obviously has not encountered the situation in which you find yourself. I would always recommend having a set of Emergency Rescue Disks to hand with any flavour of Windows.
I also suspect that the term you were looking for was 'partitioned' harddrive.