Big problem, removed recovery partition and now Vostro won't boot

I used Acronis Disc Director Suite to delete the recovery partition. It said it needed to reboot to finish the operation, so it rebooted. Except it never made it to the login screen. It would get past the "XP Professional" loading screen, then where the login was supposed to load, it wouldn't. After some Googling I tried Acronis MBR recovery tool, but that screwed things up worse, and now it doesn't make it to the XP Professional screen at all, it just says "Invalid Operating System".

I suspect that since the recovery partition was physically prior to the full operating system, something got royally messed up when I deleted it. I've got the Ultimate Boot CD from prior issues with a previous computer, is there anything I can do to salvage this?

 

using the windows xp disc to recover the install?

 

Tried that, but I have an older SP1 installation disc so it won't even load all the way, I get a bluescreen because of a driver issue.

I ended up restoring my stock Vostro image so I'm back where I was when I bought the machine. Basically I'm just going to ignore Acronis backup of my previous laptop, I'lll start fresh and I've got everything I need to get the programs I had.

Where I'm at now though is that I slipstreamed a new install disc with SP2 so the thing boots at least, but that disc doesn't detect my hard drive. So now I've got to make another one with the proper drivers to even SEE my Vostro's drive. I have a thread bookmarked with instructions so I guess I'll be doing that now.