problems with boot-- tried fixmbr, fixboot...still problems

My XPS laptop was purchased in 2004 and has 2 Gig memory, with an upgraded 250 Gig Maxtor drive in it. The original 100Gig Fujitsu had gotten full, so I got a new drive, imaged the entire thing on to the new drive, and it was good to go. It has been running fine for years, and is a great machine.

Then Saturday night I started up my Dell XPS/Inspiron Laptop (Model PP09L) and the regular XP OS didn't load at all. In fact, after the first BIOS screen, I got this message:

Loading PBR for descriptor 2...done

That was it. Nothing else. No errors beyond that. It just stayed there. Naturally, my first inclination was to go online with my desktop and contact Dell support. I logged in to check my support options and found my service agreement and support expired on Dec 16, 2007. Wonderful. :( 7 days later I am DOA on my laptop.

So, I go online and look for the error and find plenty of information related to the MBR being problematic. I even found answers here talking about it. Specifically, I followed up with loading the Recovery Console and issuing the FIXMBR command on the \Device\HardDisk0 as suggested in this article (item #7)

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877-6031733.html

When I did that, the boot up halted now, right after the first BIOS screen, and the message "Loading PBR for descriptor 2...done" then no longer even appeared. I just got a blank screen with the single underline cursor. The disk didn't boot. Everything just hung. No boot.

So, I looked at the forums again, and saw that similar symptoms occur with a problem in the boot partition, so I again looked at the article on techrepublic (and a couple I saw on these forums) and I tried the "Fixboot C:" command, hoping it would clear things up.

Well, then when I booted up I got the message:

"NTLDR is missing"

I am very concerned that I have went down a path that is simply causing more and more problems. I was able to pull the drive out after the first error and image the drive (by attaching it to another computer as a separate device and using Acronis trueimage to copy it to a USB storage drive).

In my final state I was worried that there might be some serious disk problems with the actual physical drive, so I rebooted one last time to the recovery console and tried "chkdsk c: /r/f/p". It looked like the operation ran, but it seemed to be running against a very small partition or drive. (said 10344 kilobytes total disk space). The check disk said it ran into problems that couldn't be recovered, but from what it reported (only 10meg or something located) that didn't seem right, so I am lost as to what it actually checked).

This is a 240Gig drive. So somehow the chkdsk seems to be seeing maybe not all the drive. I noted when I looked at the drive when it was plugged into another machine that it contained 3 partitions. The first one looks like it is 141 Mb FAT /Healthy (EISA) partition. The second ons is 224 GB NTFS Healthy Active. The last one is a 8.75 GB FAT32 Healthy (Unknown Partition). From what I read on other forums, this is how Dell sets up some drives, where the last partition is an image of the installed PC (initial state).

Right now, I am at a loss as to what to do. I don't know much about this stuff, and what I know is just stuff I have read without an expert actually understanding my situation and responding to it.

PLEASE PLEASE.. I need some help. I install a lot of software and really don't want to have to rebuild the box. There are diagnostic tools that are built into the BIOS that I ran against the drive, and they didn't report any problems.