[devils casper]

It looks like Vista OS is intact. Follow instructions form here to fix Vista.
In case it doesn't work, back up data using and do fresh installation.

[enderbean]

Ok so after checking I've found that all I got with my laptop is the "System Recovery DVD" which doesn't give me the option to repair as stated in the post you linked to. All I can do with this DVD is format my drive.

So now my question is, how do I go about backing it up? I started up into Linux and plugged in an external USB drive but I couldn't seem to find it anywhere. How can I get it to show up, and once I do I just drag and drop right?

Thanks so much to everyone for all your help so far.

[devils casper]

Ok so after checking I've found that all I got with my laptop is the "System Recovery DVD" which doesn't give me the option to repair as stated in the post you linked to. All I can do with this DVD is format my drive.

Try SuperGRUB CD. Boot up from it and select 'Fix Windows Boot Loader'. I have never tested it on Vista machine though but its worth to try.

So now my question is, how do I go about backing it up? I started up into Linux and plugged in an external USB drive but I couldn't seem to find it anywhere. How can I get it to show up, and once I do I just drag and drop right?

Plug-in USB Drive and execute this in Terminal :

sudo fdisk -l

It list partition structure of External disk too. Post output here.

[enderbean]

Ok here's the other drive's result:

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xa4b57300

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks    Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       30401   244196001     7  HPFS/NTFS

[devils casper]

Ubuntu doesn't support NTFS write access out of box. You have to install ntfs-3g package to enable it. Execute this

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

Your machine must have internet access for sucessfull execution of above code.
Mount External Disk now :

mkdir sdb1
sudo mount  -t  ntfs-3g  /dev/sdb1  sdb1  -o  defaults,umask=0

Open sdb1 folder and copy data in it.

[enderbean]

I can't find my notes for my classes on my hard drive. I remember from what tinkering I did get to do with Linux that I couldn't just go into "My Documents" folder from a Linux boot, and I had to put them somewhere in the WINDOWS/ directory to be able to pull stuff from one OS to the other. Are my notes and documents stuck on the Windows side? If I call up HP would they send me a Vista installation disc to use the repair tool, or am I better off finding someone who has the disc and just borrowing it?

[Jonathan183]

There should be no problem being able to access your files on Linux. You can enable ntfs support or download version 1.9 (last time I looked the latest version had their own driver and had ntfs write as experimental) of the PartedMagic CD. This will allow you read/write access of the ntfs partitions and has a mount utility.

[wolfton]

I'm sure you figured it out about three weeks ago or called it a loss. But just in case another person has the same problem, the next step would have been to locate the Douments folder in Vista.

Assuming that you left your main partition drive letter C and your C Partition is mounted to /mnt/sda1 (sda1 instead of hda1 because I think that your HP is SATA, like my HP 1410 tablet pc) and also assuming that your Windows username is "enderbean", then the path to your Documents should be "/mnt/sda1/Users/enderbean/Documents/"

You should have also been able to search for your files in your Linux GUI's search tool and you could have seen the path there.

I hope that this 'solution' is useful to anyone else frustrated with Vista...