hello i'm having a bit of a crisis, the night before i was up until 3:00 in the morning writing a large paper, the next day i tried installing debian lenny, and it installed fine, but whenever i try to boot back into windows, it trys to do this auto disk check and fails, after that everything reboots, windows was unable to automatically repair it, and i thought that by accessing the command prompt in the recovery tool and rewriting the MBR would put Vista back in charge, but all that did was get rid of the GRUB bootloader, yet something from Debian still trys to check the disk and fails, causing Windows to reboot, and i now have no way to access the paper i wrote. i normally back everything up but this happened to fall right inbetween backups, and the thought never occured to me that this would happen because i experiment with dual boots all the time (ubuntu, opensuse). please help, there's no way i would be able to write all of that again

Use a live CD like knoppix to boot the system and get your paper off the Windows drive.

now that the crisis is taken care of, you can step back and figure out what happened so you can resolve the issue.

if you have truly overwritten GRUB with the windows bootloader you shouldn't see anything resembling Linux or grub when you boot the machine.

allow me to elaborate, when i try and go into Vista, i get a black screen that says autochk program not found - skipping auto check, but the system just reboots and gives me the option to launch startup repair, or start windows normally, so i'm able to get to the command prompt from startup repair, but starting windows normally always leads to the autochk problem, so it's like a perpetual sequence of reboots, and i tried reinstalling debian to at least be able to access SOME operating system, but whenever i boot from a CD for some reason it acts like it's booting from the CD, but goes straight to the "launch startup repair" option

i'll give that a try, thanks

no such luck, it wont let me boot any sort of live CD, and i did some digging inside the command prompt with bootrec.exe, and fixing the MBR did nothing, i tried fixing the boot and it said there was no directory, i tried scanning the disk and it said it found 0 installs of Vista, which is impossible because i see the Microsoft Cooperation loading screen before the autocheck fails (not to mention installed Debian on a partition)

another problem is i'm typing all this on one of the college lounge computers, and they don't have CD burners so downloading a live CD is out of the question, not to mention Malone University's internet connection is slower than slow

please any help, i feel like such an idiot but i'm become increasingly desperate as time goes on

if i know the exact names and file locations of the papers i need, is there any way via the doss to export them to a flash drive?

You said you experiment with Ubuntu, do you have one of those live CDs lying around? If not, I'm not sure exactly how slow slower than slow is :P, but you could try DSL on your flash drive -- if it can handle Vista I'm going to assume your machine can boot USB. As for not letting you boot from USB, why don't you try disable HDD booting in your BIOS?

Wow Malone University, down in Canton, OH.. theres a name I haven't heard in a while. My parents met while they were attending Malone. We used to go down to the campus when I was a kid for various events, Sunday dinner in the cafeteria, etc. That sure was a long time ago.. :-/


Adjusting the boot order in the BIOS may be necessary to get your system to boot fro USB or a Live CD.. Syndey's idea of disabling HD boot isn't bad either.. kind of force it to look to the CD or USB.

You could also throw your hard drive into a working system as a secondary drive so you can retrieve the documents from it.

I always keep one of these usb converters on hand to do a quick and dirty temporary hookup of a Drive as a USB device to another machine. Works great if I need to grab data or something in an emergency.. It does require drivers for windows.. but a linx machine sees the adapter and it just works..

Do the lounge computers allow usb storage devices ? if so this could get you out of your pinch and give you more time to resolve your issue..