Win XP - Chkdsk not running at startup, pissing me off

[Sonicfan574]

I'm trying to repartition my sister's unused laptop because I want to install Ubuntu Server and maybe Arch Linux onto it. First attempt was last weekend; tried using Easeus Partition Master and it wouldn't work because it said there were errors on the partition. Googled the hell out of the problem, no solutions. Gave up.

A few hours ago, I managed to get Unetbootin to install Parted Magic. Started it, unmounted the primary partition - /dev/hda2 - tried to resize. Wouldn't let me. Then I took notice of an exclamation point in a yellow triangle beside the partition. Looked it up, meant there were problems with the filesystem or something. Rebooted the computer, selected XP, a million years later, the desktop appears, and I run chkdsk. Catches some shit but says it can't run in read-only mode. Started it in read-only and it said it had to be scheduled to start on next run. Went ahead with that.

Rebooted computer, didn't come up at all. Tried again. Nothing. I've tried about 2 and a half Google pages of crap documenting this problem and so far nothing has worked. I've tried everything from editing registry keys to sfc.

Tried chkntfs and it came back as dirty. I don't know what exactly this means or how to fix it but the shit I tried where I found out how to do this didn't help whatsoever.

Specs:
Dell Mini 10
Windows XP Home Edition SP3 32-bit and an unused Wubi installation of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Netbook Edition 32-bit
0.99 GB memory
1.33 GHZ Intel Atom processor