Is my hard disk buggerred???

[Neodragon]

I have a Dell Inspiron 8200.  I am running XP Pro.  I tend to keep my computer on for long periods at a time.  This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened but it is by far the worst looking...

My computer doesn't boot up.  I don't think I head any hard drive noise at all - i might be mistaken - it is very quiet compared to how it normally sounds.

Anyway, I get a black screen saying: "A disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"  This happens again when I restart. :-/

My Safe Mode doesn't work - ie, nothing happens when I hit F8.

When I get into Recovery Console using my XP Pro cd and use Fixmbr the response is: "Writing new master boot record on physical drive \Device\Harddisk0\Partition0.  The new master boot record could not be written.  The disk may be damaged"

Chkdsk /P gives the response: "4% completed'
It then waits 5 mins and says: "The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems"

Chkdsk /R gives the same response as Chkdsk /P

When choosing the "Set up Windows option" from the cd i get: "an error occurred while Setup was updating partition information on: 38155 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR] Setup cannot continue."

Is my hard disk buggerred???
Do I need to reformat the whole thing?
Can I recover important, personal files etc once I format and reinstall windows?
Where can I get such a program?

Please help...

[jw]

Sounds to me like the hard drive is shot to me. I had a problem like this a while back and was able to recover some of my files by slaving it into another computer.  Some of the data could still be read and copied. Good Luck!

[Computer Hope Admin]

Unfortunately like JW said it does appear that your hard disk drive may be bad and/or severely corrupted. It is possible that some of the data can be recovered off of the hard disk drive after it has been formatted. However if there is critical data that must be recovered, it would be best to have it professionally looked at before formatting the hard drive. Additional information about data recovery, programs used to recover data, and companies that recover data can also be found on the below link.

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000342.htm