If you use the Dell repair disk it will restore the machine to the configuration as to when it came out of the box. All data will be lost. I have had excellent results recovering data with SPINRITE from gibson research. google it. I suggest, if possibe, assuming the machine is out of warrenty, removing the hard drive and slave it to another computer and recover the data to another hard drive or dvd's before going any further. Then you can do a system reinstall and reinstall all your programs later.