two Boot problems - damaged MBR and stop booting (may be u..

I have a Fujitsu laptop with preloaded XP home edition, I also have a
partition dump image of the C drive in another 2.5" drive. File system is
NTFS.
Due to unknown reason, my boot sector in my Laptop was wiped, the drive is
now shown as unformated (the NTFS indicator was wiped) therefore the drive
cannot boot up.

I tried to use my backup drive, but cannot boot up either, the symptom is
that after Windows XP home sign is displayed and the moving bar is displayed
for about 5 seconds, the screen turned black (no curser), the disk active
display on my laptop lighted for a second and then everything stays as is
(dark, no disk activity) for hours. There is no response to key board or
ctr-alt-del actions. I have to do a hard power off by hard pressing the
power button.
The next time, when I tried to boot up, the safe boot screen will come up,
to boot in Normal windows mode will give me the same symptom as above.
To boot in safe mode without any driver, the system display loading about 15
drivers and then stop (dead stop no disk activity)
I tried all mode of safe boot including last config but encountered same
symptom.

I restored the system to the factory condition with the restore disk
supplied by Fujisu and the system works proving this is not hardware related,
but this means all my files and programs are wiped, and I do not have all the
install disks of all my previously installed programs.

Questions:

1. Is there a way to log (or to see) driver loading to see where did it
stop? May be copying a similar driver (the one where it stopped and the one
after that) from my previous backup image may cure the problem.
Any one can suggest a better cure?

2. Is there a way to cure my wiped out disk? (My backup disk and the laptop
disk are of different size so a direct overlay of the boot image will not
work, I am thinking about calculating the address using the disk size, but am
not sure how to do it)

3. The restore CD that comes with the laptop can only restore the system to
the image when it was brand new. That means I have to reinstall everything I
did on my laptop for the past 2 years, for some of the programs I cannot find
the installation disk. Is there a way to install repair (to my backup)
without wiping out everything? I do not have other installation disk other
than the restore CD from Fujitsu, does it mean I have to purchase another
license from MS? Will the upgrade XP home version work, or it need to be a
full version? (Note I already have an OEM license and key)

Any suggestions or comments