Partition mess and Linux

Ok, I need some help, deperately.

So one day (monday I think), I had this dumb idea about dual booting linux. Ok, thats fine, so all goes well there, when I realize something, I've made my linux partition waaay too small. So I go to resize it, and this is where it all breaks loose. Something got messed up. WIndows now refuses to boot, and I think it ate a couple of my partitions. I can access the NTFS one from linux just fine, and the linux one just fine, but I can't access my other ones....

fdisk reports that hda1,2, and 3 are overlapping

disk start cyl-end cyl
hda1 1-583
hda2 583-15622
hda3 15622-16807

so I see the problem, hda1/2/3 overlap, but I don't know how to change them by one cylinder. I can't get parted to start, it just yells at me about the unstable partitions. So here's the deal, I can backup my ntfs partion onto a DVD I think, and toss that, and hda5 (which isn't mounting now anyway) is expendable, its just a swap between windwos and linux, however, I cannot loose hda1, as thats the recovery partion, so I can't just dump them all and start over because I don't have a windows install disk. *pants*
I can mount all but /dev/hda5 just fine under linux, so the data is fine, its just the partition table is a mess, so how would I go about fixing this? Any ideas? I've been digging for over 6 hours now, and I give up

You will most likely need to get yourself a xp disk somehow. The disk has files to repair the boot files. I made a similar mistake, I couldn't boot xp, it turned out I deleted the OS and had to reinstall.

Good luck

Ok, so I found the OS, still there, and I found the HD, and I could ran chkdsk, fixboot, and fixmbr, and it still is failing, since I think its because my partitions are messed up, it needs fixing, but I don't know how to do that since parted doesn't like me, and cfdisk won't load, and I'm kinda scared of sfdisk.... though I think thats my last option