ok so i had a dual boot between windows and ubuntu. this was fine for a while. symantec antivirus said that i had two bad dlls, so i told symantec to remove them. when they were gone, my windows boot started freaking out. so, i started using my ubuntu partition full time. i wasn't able to write to my ntfs partition, but i could read it to listen to music so all was good. i don't know what happened, but i believe that it had to do with downloading a torrent (i was saving it to the ext2 partition that ubuntu was on) and i turned off my computer for the first time in two days (two days worth of music was also played). when i started back up, grub wouldn't boot. after a few more tries, i get into ubuntu, only for it to crash again (something that i attribute to setting it up to mount the ntfs partition upon startup). i tried booting on my xp pro cd and repairing the boot, but it couldn't even start up.

i tried booting on a ubuntu live cd and accessing that ntfs partition, but i couldn't get into the terminal (damn you, ubuntu). puppy liux couldn't see the partition as being properly formatted, and damn small linux, which i'm currently in, will not mount the partition either.

soooo.... i need a way to force this drive to be read as ntfs so that i can back up the files on it before i format my hard drives and start over. these problems are pretty deep from what i can tell. i'm not too sure how related the windows and ubuntu each dying are, but it does make matters worse and worse that windows and ubuntu would die in such proximity (i was putting off fixing my windows partition until my japanese quiz which i took today... and all of the major dying just happened as i was trying to do my japanese homework which is a set of listening exercises which are only available online... which is due in 45 minutes... fuck).

anyways... help por favor?