Are you familiar with the Automated System Recovery feature in Win XP?
This is a wonderful recovery feature that will format the partition where the OS is loacated and find the ASR Backup via a floppy disk.
You boot up on the cd press F6 to load the Raid drivers and immediately press F2 to envoke ASR.
From there just follow instructions.

The only problem is if you did not perform a ASR backup prior to the failure, this feature would not be available to you.
This ASR backup is performed by the MS Backup feature in WinXP.
When you double click on the Win Backup, on the first screen, look about 3/4 the way down that page and find the advanced screen.
Click on this Advanced word, on the next screen you will be asked if you want to backup the OS using ASR?
Select this feature.
If you have a partition on the hd that does not contain any OS.
You can place the backup there, if not you are going to have to use a DVD writer or CDRW writer to do the backup to.
It will be a gig and a half or about that size.
I have my hd partitioned via a 12gig for the OS, then the rest as a data partition.
I keep the backup on the data end of the hard drive along with all the important files, games etc. Most programs are also installed into the data partition.
Once you have the backup done. All you need to do is boot on the cd, press F6 for the scsi drivers, and imediately press F2 to envoke the ASR. Have the scsi drivers floppy ready and the ASR floppy that was created during the backup ready.
After installing the scsi drivers you may place the ASR floppy in the floppy disk.
The program will just copy some files to the hard drive, then it will began to format the OS partition. After the format is complete it will began to write files to the partition.
After the OS is basically installed, it will acess the floppy and all your programs, email, settings, drivers everything just the way you had it at the backup time will began to install.
Takes only about half hour and you are done, system restored.