well, I couldn't get anything to start at all. but apparently now my other windows cd works again. or so i hope. should definitely make a copy onto a less scratched cd... i shall update the post with some news on what i'm doing now. and... yeah... it all scares me very much, as my portable drives aren't big enough to store everything i want saved off of the old windows drive. and i think formatting that whole thing would be the best at this point.