Gateway 700 USB, LNX-BBC or Damnsmall linux
 

I am a regular user of Slackware, but I am trying to recover some data from a Gateway 700 for a friend. I have tried both damn small linux, and lnx-bbc and run into the same problem. durring inittial boot the keyboard works, but when I get to the login prompt it is dead. This (horrible, evil) machine has only USB ports for input devices, and the keyboard is a hub for the mouse.... there are no ps/2 connectors. The machine had/has Win ME which has died (as it should), but before I either reformat or roof test it, I would like to get some data off of it. Any suggestions?

I found that the Slackware Live CD could access Win2K files on my pc, so it should haveno problems with fat32 - I didn't even have to configure anything. Which was nice.

You could boot off that and then copy any files to floppy or cd.