My work laptop started cycling from blue screen to blue screen yesterday. We have an IT department to fix this kind of thing, but I have a lot of files that I want off of there first. Secondly, I think I know which application is causing the trouble (if it is not the disk itself)

1. Do you guys know a way to run a forensic test on a borked Win Xp NTFS partition? Maybe I can find out why it keeps blue screening over and over. If the application in question is not the problem, I still would like to be able to get at least one boot out of it so I can more easily get my stuff off of it before it is sent in for a rebuild. The blue screen goes by so fast I can't tell which file is missing or if there is another problem.

2.. I have never used a Virtual Machine before. Is there a way to run my borked XP inside of a VM of a Linux LiveCD.

3. Any ideas would be nice. Ideally, I want the laptop to boot windows. I am able to use the PCLinuxOS LiveCD to save data from the hard drive to a thumb drive, but, again, I sure would like for it to boot.

THanks,

B.

you should be able to run a live cd, mount the drive and copy the files to a memory stick or if they are small just email them to yourself.