It wants the password first. You can get past that but it does just do a repair, you don't get any options to change anything.Have you've tried "repair" option from and XP boot disk?.
I'm beginning to form the view, already expressed on here, that it is not worth trying to do this. I just didn't want to face up to the effort of re-building it. I will, as suggested, try to recover the data using a Linux boot copy and then do a rebuild with a more modern os. I'll just have to prompt the prof for the location of the missing discs which I think he's filed somewhere safe.