WinXP Pro - Trouble booting up

OK... quick rundown

System: Misc thrown together by some out-of-business company
Motherboard: MSI
Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2000
RAM: 512MB
HDD: 80GB Western Digital (new)

This system went down last Nov. I installed a new hard drive, upgraded to WinXP Pro, reloaded all necessary programs/files and put it back online.
Has been running fine.

Today, it suddenly went off.
The guy who uses it asked me if I was working on it has it was showing the regular bios bootup stuff... except that it was saying that the Master/Primary Disk had failed.

For a few hours now, I have tried a few times to get it to boot into Windows... no luck.

It will boot up, go past the bios entry point, then show the info for entering Safe Mode.... Last Known Config.... Start Windows Normally.

I have tried selecting the various logins and get the same result on all -- it shows the WinXP boot pic then just goes back into the which login (ie safe mode, etc).

I tossed in the CD and went to the Recovery Console and ran CHKDSK it found some errors, I then ran the repair option under CHKDSK --- it took awhile but then went back to doing as above (safe mode, etc).

I did not make disks, so I am not sure how to run the Windows ASR. I am now wondering if there is some sort of issue with the motherboard as this is a new hard drive.

Anyone have some input on this ....?

thanks