Booting NOT-Windows

[Peg Harris]

I realize this isn't a Linux question, but maybe there's a Linux answer ;)

I have a Dell laptop, that should be running XP, and is less than a year old.  This morning, it decided that there was a file missing and it won't completely boot.  It doesn't even want to do a "SAFE" boot.  I put in XP's "recovery CD" and that lands me into a recovery console (which is basically a DOS prompt.)  I figured if I can at least backup some of my significant files, I won't even mind reinstalling the whole system, since there aren't too many "extras" (just a few freebies, like Open Office and Gimp) installed.

If I boot into this recovery mode with my external USB disk plugged in, I can see files on the main hard drive and on this USB disk.  But, I can not copy from one to the other.  I called Dell support, and was told that since the initial installation did not give the "Administrator" account a password, I've missed out on some useful recovery tools (that would have been a nice warning to get during the install.) 

Since this machine has the ability to boot off a USB device or a CD, I wonder if I can boot up something else that will see all of my other disks, and let me copy my XP files onto my USB drive before I end up shipping this machine back to Dell (who said they'd just blindly replace the hard drive) or reinstalling from scratch.  

Peg

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