MBR repair

about 7-10 days ago I installed the latest patches to XP pro from windows
update. Upon the required reboot I got a 'disk read error' at the end of the
bios boot messages and before any sort of windows boot messages. This has
happened before with ms updates and I'd like to not do the "wipe and
reinstall fromscratch" thing like the last 2 times.

Observations:

- I can boot a fedora 8 live cd and see all of my files on the hard drive.
I used that to make a backup of all my data files onto another machine.

- I can't get my XP Pro CD to boot and get me to the recovery console. It
says something about waiting while setup examines my hardware and then the
screen goes blank. One question I have is if my CD even has the recovery
console. My computer came with WinME pre-installed and I later purchased and
XP Pro upgrade CD. This has made the two prior reinstalls painful as I first
had to reinstall WinME and then do the XP upgrade.

- I have another computer here that came with XP pre-installed along with
the OEM XP CD. I have since reformatted that drive and run a different OS on
that machine. So I tried booting from that XP CD to see if I could get to
the recovery console. Same deal with getting that initial message from the
setup program and then the screen going blank.

- The WinME boot cd is worthless. It will only give the option of reformat
and start from scratch and of course WinME probably doesn't understand NTFS
anyway.

- At one point I bought a new hard drive which was much larger. I simply
did a from scratch install of winme followed by the xp upgrade followed by a
zillion times through running windows update and rebooting. When I did this,
I left the old drive in the machine and just moved the cables over. So I can
move the cables back and boot into XP if there is anything at all useful that
can be done there.

So... my theory is that the MBR got corrupted which is why I can't boot but
why linux can read the drive with no problems. What are my options for
fixing the MBR without rebuilding yet again?

To say I'm frustrated with microsoft would be an understatement here. XP
has died (as part of an update from microsoft) 3 times now and the whole
reason I coughed up $200 for XP pro was becuase WinME had self destructed
twice already.

Thanks
-Dan