My friend has a laptop that won't boot (it's Windows XP) he has heaps of files & folders on the internal hard drive, which he obviously can't access. I have a SystemRescueCD disc, but it's hard work to actually work out/find out how one would go about actually trying retrieve these files using SystemRescueCD. The most simplest way would be appreciated, or a link that details what we can try....
I think I can convince him to come on board the Linux wagon, but obviously we need to retrieve his files before we start wiping out XP!

Many thanks for any reply

Paul

You need a place to put all these files...

First, you may need to change your boot order to boot from CD:-

A quick start manual is at http://www.sysresccd.org/Quick-start...d_Writing_a_CD

boot a live cd and copy content onto an usb stick or external disk or network or whatever.

As mentioned above, use a live CD, I've used Puppy Linux in the past as it's small though any Distro would do, mount the Windows partition of the faulty disk plus mount an external USB drive as the destination for the recovered files then it's just a matter of identifying what's to be recovered on the Window's partition/disk and drag-n-dropping it onto the external destination drive.
The files can be transferred from the external drive to whatever system you build as the new host.
Linux doesn't care what sort of files you want to recover, they're all just seen as ones and zeros. If you recovered them to a Linux system there are enough native applications to open/edit/view most common file types.

Does that help?

Play Bonny!