debian upgrade not booting

[Master of Reality]

So i did a dist-upgrade on debian testing on my laptop to upgrade everything. Now none of the kernels boot, GRUB gives me an error saying

Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition

I dont know my partition scheme, so i decided to try to boot a Kubuntu live DVD i had lying around and check it out.
While booting it gives me this error (and similar ones several times)

Buffer i/0 error on device sr0, logical block 279335
SQUASHFS error: unable to read fragment cache block
SQUASHFS error: unable to read page

I think to myself, "this looks like a job for system rescue CD" and it loads to the point saying

ISOLINUX version

and freezes there.

I have windows installed on this as well and it boots. I really need the data on my linux partition, but if the filesystem is messed up and i install the ext2 windows driver even worse things could happen to my data.

Any idea on the problem, i'm about to look for a utility to check for bad blocks that i will be able to use (i used scandisk, but dont put any faith in it anyway).

I'm thinking maybe its a filesystem problem, but then i dont know why my bootable DVD does not work.

[Calum]

does the live dvd try to mount your linux partition at the point it is freezing? that's just an idle thought, and is probably not the case or i think you'd have mentioned it.

If it was the case though, i'd try using a live-bootable disk that doesn't automatically mount your partitions.

not much help, sorry.

[Master of Reality]

well err.. for some reason i decided to download an image of the system rescue cd that was a year old and boot that. And it worked, and i found out my partition scheme and that debian had done its automagic kernel entries to menu.lst to change all the entries to a root partition that doesnt exist.

So i guess the kubuntu dvd has an unrelated device problem, and the newest system rescue cd (based on gentoo) has some other problem.

Coincidences?

[Void Main]

Did I hear that right? The latest Debian rescue disk is based on Gentoo?

[Master of Reality]

no, it is a live CD distro called System Rescue CD (www.sysresccd.org)

[Calum]

i suppose it is the 21st century version of good old tomsrtbt, eh?