Vista down, forceing me to reinstall and format all partitio

It depends on how much damage to the filesystem there was on whether or not you'll be able to recover anything.

But DOS ceased to exist with Windows with the shift to XP. XP was/is based on the NT lineage, and so there's absolutely no DOS anymore. But if you mean a command line of some sort, then you can try the recovery console. But again, it depends on what was damaged and how badly. Also by what. If you had a virus or some other kind of malicious program that overwrote your drive, then you're pretty much screwed short of sending it to recovery services. That tends to start at about $500 for them to look at it. Figure on at least $2000US for anything meaningful.

You can try a Linux LiveCD to see what you can manage with that, but again it depends on the extent of the damage.

And typically, no, there is no method of recovering from a damaged Windows install without having to reinstall everything. Windows doesn't offer the level of compartmentalization that Linux/Unix does, and this is by design. Even if you don't format the partition, you still obliterate the registry, which then requires pretty much all apps to be reinstalled.

All in all, I'd let this be a lesson on the importance of backups.

They are "dirty" and need to be checked by chkdsk or the Vista equivalent of it. But that shouldn't mean formatting. Can you tell us the exact text of the message (so exact that we can google it)?

With a Linux Live CD you should be able to copy the data to somewhere else. Unless that checks for "dirty" partitions also and, for example, refuses to do copy any potentially corrupt file.

Kees