SSD/MBR FUBARed?

Okay, I'm kind of a geek wannabe, so while I do know some things, I need a lot of hand-holding on others.

The device:
Dell Mini 9 with 8GB STEC (PATA?) SSD

Where everything went wrong:
Tried to wipe factory-installed Ubuntu using Boot N Nuke. Wanted to install XP. Power failure midway through. Tried Boot N Nuke again, but failed at 51% with non-fatal error, indicating bad sectors.


Tried installing XP, with error 0x0000007B while accessing setup files (can't get to recovery console). From MS:
"• A device driver that the computer boot controller needs is not configured to start during the startup process.
• A device driver that the computer boot controller needs is corrupted.
• Information in the Windows XP registry (information related to how the device drivers load during startup) is corrupted"


Tried eeeverything. Magic Boot. Ultimate Boot Disk. Active @ Killdisk. SuperF Disk. GParted (cannot find live file system, can't remember if I deleted all partitions last time). MS-DOS 6.22 chkdsk (scandisk won't load). DiscWizard/MaxBlast. Acronis True Image (but did not have image, stupidly).


I have a Vista disk, but I can't try to install it because the drive is about 140MB too small. But at least I can get to the recovery thing and cmd--yay, because I'm running out of blank CDs.


Chkdsk gives me the summary--no bad sectors. But when I try /X or /R, I get messages like:
Cannot lock volume for direct access.
Windows cannot run disk checking on this volume because it is write protected.

It does not offer to let me run Chkdsk on restart (I imagine because Windows is not installed).

I read somewhere that the command mkdiskraw might help. This is not recognized in cmd however. Everything says to run it from the Recovery Console, but Vista's rcon is a gui. I think it only applies to XP (from which I cannot access rcon because setup doesn't finish loading).

I also saw you could use a script, so I made the .txt, saved to USB, and tried to run from cmd:
mkdiskraw 0
diskpart /add \Device\HardDisk0 c:
format /FS:NTFS C: /q

It didn't recognize this either, I think it said it wasn't a program or batch file.

So, I don't know how to run this. I need line-by-line hand-holding on this, because I'm not that familiar with command-line interfaces and definitely know knothing about scripts and how to initiate them.

I saw something else about using Dskprobe.exe (but I can't find an iso and it needs server 2003?),
I also considered installing XP to an external drive, imaging, booting into Acronis, and writeing image to SSD, but my initial attempt failed (didn't think it was worth pursuing without more info),
Or...installing XP externally so I could run a low-level format on the drive from Disk Manager.
I have a bootable 16gb USB thumb drive if this is at all helpful, though it's empty at the moment. Maybe I could install Vista to it if I can figure out how, but that sounds like a lot of work for a long shot.

All I really want is to install XP without having to convince Dell to replace my drive. I'm willing to reinstall Linux or whatever else I need to do to make it work, but I don't really know what's wrong or how to remedy it. Any ideas at all about what's the problem or possible solutions are welcome.

Thanks so much.

 

Okay, turns out my XP disc is damaged, and apparently so is the backup copy I made from it the other day...or they're just incompatible with the hardware. Wish I had figured that out 3 days ago.
%$@*#!

By the way, if there's a way to kill this post, please feel free to do it or let me know how. Thx