Black screen - Hard Drive error help

I restarted my computer normally through Windows, and when it was booting back up, after the BIOS messages and everything, at the place where the Windows XP logo normally displays instead a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left is displayed. The cursor goes away after a few seconds, I'm pretty sure this is a hard drive issue. When the black screen with the cursor first appears, I also hear a single short beep.

I loaded the XP disk and did Repair and ran CHKDSK /p. It said it found an error, so I ran CHKDSK /r and after a couple of hours when it finished, i ran /p again and it didn't find any errors. I tried booting again to the hard drive, but I got the same error.

Also, when I call dir from the recovery console on C:\, my folder structure is all there. Does that mean it's likely my data hasn't been lost?

I have an IDE Samsung 250GB HDD. I still haven't tried running fixboot from the recovery console, but I wasn't sure if that would mess up my hard drive in some way. Does anybody know how to fix this? I'm really worried the hard drive is corrupted and I'll lose all my data.