Help! System won't boot after failed partition split!

In short, a catastrophic failure during a DD10 partition resizing has turned my laptop into a paperweight.  The partition is probably damaged, and it won't boot to anything.  I need help either fixing it or recovering my data preliminary to a nuking/fresh start .

Using Disk Director 10, I attempted to split my primary drive partition (a Dell Inspiron E1505 running XP Media Center Edition 2005).

I committed, and the procedure started with a reboot. It churned away for a few minutes, displaying status info and a progress bar, etc. Then it stopped and gave an error. I didn't write it down exactly, but is was something along the lines of, "Operation failed. Cannot resize partition with bad blocks"

"Bummer, but oh well," says I, and I reboot.  But it didn't and won't come back up--displays the Dell motherboard splash screen for about half a second (the one with, "F2 = Setup, F12 = Boot Menu" in the upper right-hand corner), then it goes black and inert. "$#*&!," says I.

It would appear that Disk Director started resizing the partition, then something went wrong (maybe the disk going bad) which not only caused the operation to fail, but prevented Disk Director from undoing what it had begun.  I'm no techs-pert, but I'm guessing that the file or data structure (or whatever) of my partition has been damaged, leaving me mightily screwed.

So... now what?  I doubt there's anything I can do that will just "FIX IT," but I'd love to be proven wrong.  Most of my stuff was backed up, and I can deal with cutting my losses and starting over with a full format and OS install if there's no other choice... But there is some data on the drive that I really don't want to lose, and I can't afford data recovery service.  I'm fairly tech-savvy, but I need some real help here!  I don't even know where to start.

Thanks to all in advance!

--Clark