Hello. I hope someone has a bit of advice for me.  I also hope this isn’t too long; I’m trying to give as much potentially useful info as possible. Thanks.

I've got a Dell Inspiron 9300 with a standard installation of Windows Media Center Edition and a Seagate Momentus 5400RPM 160Gb HDD (model ST9160821A) that I upgraded to (from the original 60Gb) using Acronis' clone utility several months ago. The machine has worked flawlessly since then.

The problems started when I recently updated to MS ActiveSync 4. The ActiveSync install on my Dell notebook completed ok and I was asked to reboot my computer to complete installation.  I did so. The colorful Win XP logo flashed for a second as usual, and then... blackness... nothing... for several minutes. I powered off, and tried again. Same result, even after an hour of waiting no Welcome screen.  (As a side note, thinking back I wonder, is this the drivers loading section of Windows boot and the Activesync update had 'toasted' one or more drivers which Windows then couldn't load?)  Subsequent attempts to boot in Safe Mode or to Last Known Good Configuration were unsuccessful.

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I then booted with the Win XP CD and entered the rescue console. I recall I DEFINITELY WAS REQUIRED to enter my administrative password so I'm fairly certain the partition was intact at that point.

Obviously, in retrospect, I certainly should have immediately first run Chkdsk, but I honestly can't recall if I ran it or not as this was a couple of weeks ago; but eventually after reading a post or two in the forums I decided to try the Fixboot or FixMBR commands.

I only tried one of them (I'm 98%entry DID NOT ASK to choose  sure it was Fixboot as this seemed less potentially dangerous if something went wrong.) However, this command didn't help.  

From the rescue console (which upon an existing Windows installation, nor a password or credentials) I tried to run the DIR command and got, "An error occurred during directory enumeration."  Chkdsk reported, "The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems." And upon a fresh boot attempt I received,

  Loading PBR 2... done
  A disk read error occurred; Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.

(However, from drive E (D is my CDROM) I was successfully returned the contents of the Dell System Restore partition.)

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 P.S. I posted this issue in another website's forum and had the following advice:

  Boot from the XP CD, get into the Recovery Console, 
  and type the following commands:

  FIXMBR C:
  FIXBOOT C:
  COPY CDDrive:\I386\NTLDR C:\
  COPY CDDrive:\I386\NTDETECT.COM C:\
  BOOTCFG /rebuild
  Reboot

Needless to say, although FixMBR and FixBoot seemed to go ok, upon the Copy commands the system kept crashing (BSD informed me it was 'protecting my hardware') when I tried to copy the files.

Of course the next recommended step, running "BootCFG /rebuild", wouldn't run either reporting, "Failed to successfully scan disks for Windows installations. This error may be caused by a corrupt file system, which would prevent Bootcfg from successfully scanning. Use chkdsk to detect any disk errors."

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Next, I downloaded Selkie Rescue (rated 5 stars by Tucows) created a boot CD, and it failed to see the drive or partition or something, so obviously no rescue. I made absolutely no changes to the Dell system with this Selkie CD.

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Next, I booted with “Ultimate Boot CD 2007” which has a number of tools on it. For example, the MBRWizard tool. When asked to 'List MBR entries' it returned the following:

 MBRWiz - Version 1.52
 Disk:0 Size 153G
 Posi MBRndx Type/Name  Size Active Hide Start Sector Sectors
 ---  ------ ---------- ---- ------ ---- ------------ ----------
 0    0      DE-UNKNWN  47M  No     No   63           96,327
 1    1      07-NTFS    148G Yes    No   96,390       302,327,235
 2    2      DB-C.DOS   5.0G No     No   302,423,625  10,153,080

This CD also has a few other drive related tools. Under the following menus I’ve run the following and inspected the drive BUT I’VE MADE NO CHANGES USING ANY OF THE TOOLS BELOW since I’m not sure what I’m doing:

PARTITION
-BootBuild (can create a new boot sector by manually inputting variables)
-MbrFix (can run MbrFix, I don't think it's the same as the MS MbrFix but I'm not sure)
-TestDisk by Christophe Grenier (sees the partition, has an option to write partition structure to disk; also has other options I don't understand how to use)

DIAGNOSTIC
-Check Disk (doesn't see the drive)
-DiskCheck 1.057 (error accessing drive C)
-HDTune (scan for errors finds none, SMART returns all status as OK)

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SUMMARY: So, since the crash I've ONLY run Fixboot once, and then yesterday FixMBR and Fixboot again as per the above instructions. The hardware checks out as good with Dells utility and 2 other utilities as well.

To conclude, my current status is that upon boot I get the following error:

  A disk read error occurred
  Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

I have Dell's CD and there isn't any option to perform a Repair Installation or such. Just to reinstall, which if selected, Windows sees the space as [C: Partition2] but unformatted; specifically file system is [Unknown].

I hope I'm not without options; I've got so much data I’d lose. I guess I could try sending it to one of those recovery services that charge several hundred dollars. All was great until I installed the Microsoft Activesync update! It was the only thing I installed/changed and immediately upon reboot I was dead.

Is my data recoverable? It seems it should be since many of these products/tools say they can save your data even after a format, and/or if the partition has been deleted. (Provided of course that the hardware is ok - which in my case it is.)  I just don’t know enough to use them.

Can anybody offer a suggestion or course of action? I'm getting desperate to retrieve my data.

Thanks so very much.