More Apple woes ... Asus, anyone?

I wanted to copy some files from an external HD onto my MBP. However, the drive appears to be corrupted, and won't mount under 10.4. However, it will mount under 10.5. So, I use my PB12 (with 10.5) to mount the drive, and get ready to copy the files off of it. However, soon realize that I don't have enough free space on any other drives to accommodate the files I'm trying to copy. Decide to use my MBP as another external drive for the PB12, to copy the files directly from one to the other. But, somehow the MBP drive becomes corrupted during the copy. Leopard? Not sure.
Can no longer boot the MBP, although not completely despondent yet because I have a backup via JungleDisk (set to do hourly backups - sweet). Poke around a bit and manage to mount it on the PB12 and run Disk Utility against it. No dice. Then reboot it and get into command line, running fdsk against it. No dice. Reboot again and it actually boots. Everything works, have access to my files, happy briefly. However, Disk Utility still reports failures, and ... oh wait ... my Desktop and Dock settings aren't saved between logins. Something's corrupted in there. And my Preferences folder alternatively shows 12 files and 50+ files, depending on when I open it.
So I decide to use my MBP install disks to rebuild it, but don't have space on an external drive to back everything up. (Would use JungleDisk, but it'd be too slow to download.) So I take the MBP, boot it into target disk mode, and then attach it to Rachel's laptop as an external HD. Copy all of the files onto her machine, but there isn't enough space. So pull some of the files onto my iPod, freeing up a bit of space, and then pull the rest of the files over. Then format my MBP HD, and try to do the install. But the MBP disks are for Ilana's MBP, not mine.
Remembering this from a previous incident, I decide to do what worked last time: keep my MBP in target mode, and use Ilana's laptop to do the install (onto my MBP as an external HD, rather than onto her internal HD). However, this time, it says that it can't install onto that external HD.
Deep breath.
Currently working on Plan C, which is to mount my MBP as an external drive to Ilana's MBP, and then doing a restore of her HD onto my HD. Assuming this works, will reboot my machine once the copy is complete, and then delete her profile and add one for me. After that? Figure out how to relicense Adobe Creative Suite without de-licensing it first (which I couldn't do, once my machine decided to stop booting), as well as iTunes (within which I recently did the once-a-year-relicense-all-my-machines).
Wish me luck. Meanwhile, all my bets are on the Asus EEE PC (which I'm currently using).