Dell desktop hibernated, won't wake or reboot

I have a Dell 4100 desktop with a few months old WD 120 gig hard drive (and a new CPU fan), upgraded to XP with all the latest MS fixes automatically updated via the web. It clunks along OK, the hard drive for sure never had any problems. I keep it defragged.

Yesterday, trying to restart it, it went into hibernate mode somehow (I didn't click on the option, I don't even know if it displays); anyway, it won't wake up, even if I unplug it and let it sit for a few hours then plug it in. I get "Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" which just brings me back again. I've checked the bios setup and it is set for the correct hard disk.

I have a bootable floppy (spinrite from gibson research) and that boots OK. (spinrite doesn't want to try to fix the disk, says the parbreastion is bigger than the disk physical size). I can boot from the XP upgrade CD and tried to repair the old XP installation, but it didn't help. I tried running chkdsk from the repair console (text mode interface) booted off the CD, no difference. I didn't try a full install of XP, because I didn't want to overwrite all my documents and stuff.

I don't care about saving anything that got hibernated, I just want it to boot. I don't need it to be able to hibernate in the future, being a desktop and all, I just want it to come back to life now and not lose everything on the disk. Is there a way to short circuit the hibernation so it just plain reboots? I can see the hibernate.sys file in the root directory, from the repair console. Can I just delete it?