XP won't boot; unable to access hard drive

Greetings all -
Working on a friend's desktop computer running XP Home. Symptom: at startup, system displays boot menu (safe mode, last known good, etc.). Regardless of the menu item selected, the system hard resets - all the way back to POST, then displays the boot menu again.

Put the XP Home CD in, switched the BIOS settings to boot from the CD. Enter Windows Setup, select "R" for recovery console, and the system begins to examine the drive - then freezes forever. I left it in this condition for 24 hours at one point with no progress or indicator of any status whatsoever.

Opened the case, extracted the Seagate 80GB SATA 3.5" drive, connected it to my laptop running XP PRO with a USB-to-IDE/SATA gadget I have for just such purposes.

On my laptop, Windows recognizes that there is a drive attached, and assigns it a drive letter, but will not allow me to access the drive thru Windows Explorer. Error message: "Drive F: is not accessable; the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable".

Enter Computer Management (right click on My Computer, 'manage'), and the drive shows as healthy with an active partition, but no file system.

I have a few low-level utilities (Acronis, Active@ Partition Recovery, etc.) which show that there are files on the drive, and will allow me to do a sector-by-sector backup of the drive, so I'm able to recover the data.

My question is this: I suspect that the MFT or MBR is corrupted. Can this be restored so that the disk can be accessed, and ultimately restored to a bootable condition?

Any suggestions would be appreciated -
S2