Thanks for all the feedback. Very helpful.

I belive I was in the recovery consile, as it dropped me to a command
window. I did use the setup disks, but when I tryied to run chkdsk /r,
I got an error that it could not find some file, like autochk.exe.
So, I went and got a copy of XP Professional and ran the recovery
console from there, and it worked.

I did not get a progress bar, but I got a percentage counter. As I
said, it went up to 80% (took about 45 minutes), then went back to 50%
and take 1 hour to get to 51%. I re-booted at that point, and things
seemed to be working. I received that KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR error
during a Windows update. I rebooted and the updates completed.

Anyhow, I am not failiar with "Bart's Bootable CD". Can you tell me a
bit about that? You mention that a password was needed to get into
the recovery console? I never had to supply a password to fix this
laptop........

Thanks.