Please help! - Macbook Air that failed repair disk process, will not boot

Hello, and thanks for looking.
A bit of background:
My Macbook air recently started working stragely post upgrade to most recent snow leopard. Symptoms: spinning beach ball when cursor went up to menu, and could not click on apple symbol. Would still run 'normally' though.
Fixed permissions and did a disk check - was advised to repair disk - and this process failed 1/2 way through. The computer then would now not boot up in safe mode or otherwise. All I can do it boot up with superdrive into OS.
Due to small windows partition (I think) I cannot simply reinstall the OS, as it gives me the message "cannot change disk - save as many files as possible and erase and install".... where the final problem begins....
All I can then access is Utilities, with my options being erase and reinstall, or to try and make an image of my Mac HD - however - cannot eject the superdrive as it is running the OS to put the drive image on my external drive.
Seems my only option is to erase the drive at this stage?? Called Apple and this was a "new problem" to them, and repair centres didnt know what to do either.
The only glimmer of hope is that if I hold "option" down when starting I can still boot into windows, but cannot save the image there either. All I can do on that screen is establish a network/internet connection.
I gather that I cannot remove the Air HDD and put it in another mac as it does not have a standard interface, but then came across the "Netbooting" feature.
Would this somehow allow me to run through remote disk the OS on another Mac? and then have connected my external drive to save my HDD image to?
Or am I stuffed?
ANY advice would be hugely appreciated. Thanks so much.

I would suggest trying to save/repair that drive with DIskWarrior yet before having to stop here and pick up a paddle.
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