Good. There is hope yet.
Ok, you appear to be learning . I was trying to keep things as simple as possible, and do I not know the permissions you have set on your /home files (and you are not telling us).
No, that is just your personal data. When you think about it, the OS data doesn't really matter, because you can always reinstall that.
If you want to know which OS packages (as opposed to personal data) were installed after the base-install of your OS, there's probably a way of doing this, but your base-system seems to be broken, so this may not be possible or even advisable.

770MB of data is easy to back up, but you did not answer my Qs: Eg: "What data do you need to save?"

If we can forget about the emails and bookmarks, but save the video, music and documents, life will be easier.

You created the /OLD directory because you need to create a "mountpoint" (which is just a directory) before you can mount a filesystem ( Eg your sda5 ) to it.

Once the mountpoint directory was created, the partition could be mounted to it, and your files appeared at the mountpoint.

When you understand this, you'll realise that this is very different from the windows way of doing things, and the linux way of managing disks is much more flexible and generally "better".

So, let us know the answers to the Qs when you have a USB HDD (with 1GB of free space) available.

oh sorry, I read the question but forgot to answer it. Well the answer is obviously everything, if possible .
As you can see, there's not much (no video or music or photos, there are elsewhere, and 700MB, that's not much afterall)

If you have the USB stick you can now insert it and either drag and drop all the files from /OLD/home/yourusername to your USB stick (I would create a new folder there like OLDHOME and drag the files there) or you can use gparted to look at the USB stick and figure out how it is set up to manually mount it like you did your sda5 partition. It will show up in gparted as sdb, but it's partions may vary.

okay, I selected all the files and copied them. Most of the files aren't "mine" (I mean, I didn't create and edited them myself, they were either here before or automatically added).
I didn't really understand the part about gparted so I didn't do that.
Yet this isn't enough, is it?
I mean, what about all the programs that I installed and the system personal settings, for instance ?

Determining the programs that were installed after installation will be harder. Many of the programs will be installed with Ubuntu, such as open office. The beauty of Ubuntu is that it's as easy as searching synaptic for the programs you want. It's doubtful many or any for that matter programs can't simply be searched for and installed. It's free and you just click and install.

What you've done so far is back up all the configuration files and data for those programs, so that if you have a live cd of the same version of Ubuntu that you had installed, then you can just go forward with the install, delete the contents of the new /home folder after you reboot and add whatever programs,and copy your backed up data over in it's place.

OK, if that's the only solution. But can't I at least get a list of the programs that were installed after the system installation, so that I know what to reinstall ?
And what about system preferences, such as how fast the mouse goes and other simple things like that?

All the settings and preferences were backed up when you backed up home if you copied all the files........Even for the installed programs. What programs those are I guess the only way I can tell you how to do that would be to open a terminal and do That will give you a list of all installed programs. Whether they were installed after install, or as part of the installation is harder to say.

You could run the above command, copy and paste that to a text file, call it OLDPRGMS. Save that file to the USB stick. Reinstall Ubuntu. Run thE command on the newly isntalled system. Copy and paste that to a text file, call it NEWPGRMS. Compare the two text files and whatever is lacking from NEWPGRMS is what you need to install using synaptic.

Someone else may have a better idea.

I think there is a command to compare things, would that work ? And what about the bins of the DVD? Aren't they the same as the bins of the newly installed system? If so, we could compare now, without waiting for the system to be reinstalled, what do you think ?
Would that help to know when the system was installed, so that we can just take what's been added more recently?
(and I think there are binaries in other folders than /usr/bin, though I don't remember them by heart).

You can do any of those things. Programs maybe installed in locations aside from /usr/bin, but they should still have links in /usr/bin for the most part so you can still list from there. It sounds like you have a good idea of where to go from here.

Even if you can't dricetly use the package manager on your broken system, you can still get a list of the packages (ie programs that you installed) by using the fact (Debian package policy) that each package will have made a directory called /usr/share/doc/packagename

then save the newly created file "packages.txt" to your external disk for latter reference.

Evo2.

No I don't know where to go from here, lol. I merely know how to use ls. These are just suggestions that I'm making to you experts. Seriously, you can tell me exactly what to do, I'll do whatever you want. But I have no clue what to do exactly, and I don't want to make it any worse than it is.

evo2, I'll do just that.
edit: ok I did it. There are quite a lot of (2301) programs, I doubt I've installed all of them. But maybe they were installed by the person that installed the system. Are you sure all of these were installed manually ?

By two white lines, does it look sort of like this?

http://itsbrad212.emenace.com/upload/img_3486.jpg

Those are going to be individual packages, not the programs themselves. As far as making it any worse, your system no longer boots. It doesn't get any worse unless you smell smoke! Installing the system isn't a scary thing, and reinstalling software in Ubuntu couldn't be easier. It's not going to be like windows where you have to do one thing, click yes, yes, yes and the do it all over for the next. You can just go to synaptic and choose the programs, it's going to tell you that you need some other packages/dependencies and then it's going to do it. The only thing you really need to watch out for at this point is to not overwrite your windows partitions. It might be a good idea to backup /boot/grub/menu.lst as well, just in case something goes screwy with booting.

P.S. I consider myself to be a newbie.

itsbrad, I can't get to your image. It looks like a black screen with 2 underscores, in the top of the screen, both between the middle of the screen and the edge of the screen.
So what should I do now ?

I'm not sure what to do so I'll wait for your instructions.