Eventually, you will probably have to do as Dell has advised you. I assume
that they actually told you to use a restore CD, which replaces C: with an
image from a hidden partition? This is different than a repair of XP, which
would leave your personal files intact. But, a repair requires a real XP
CD, and Dell usually does not provide one of those.
In any case, there are several ways to get your data off of the PC, without
using the installed version of XP.
The easiest is to download a free ISO (CD image) of a LINUX variatin called
KNOPPIX. See link below. Do this on a working PC with a high-speed
internet connection, becasue the KNOPPIX ISO is about 700 Meg. Burn the ISO
to a CD using a progam that supports "burn form image" or similar. Both
Nero and Easy CD Creator can do this. Do not simply drag&drop the ISO on a
CD.
Attach an external USB hard drive to the dead Dell, then boot the Dell with
the KNOPPIX CD. This may take a few minutes, since CD access is a lot
slower than disk access. If it asks any questions, take the defaults or hit
enter. From the KNOPPIX desktop you can copy whole directories from C: to
the external hard drive. KNOPPIX also supports writing to CDs, networks,
internet, etc.
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html (link to main website and
downloads)
http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Main_Page (info, how-to, etc)
If you can not manage to get KNOPPIX, you could, in theory, rescue
individual files using the XP recovery console, but that would be tedious.
Here are some links about the recovery console.
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/win_xp_rec.htm
http://www.wown.com/j_helmig/wxprcons.htm
http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy33.htm (near bottom)
If the C: drive were FAT32, you could boot from a DOS floppy and use XCOPY
to cop the file to a second internal hard drive or maybe an internal ZIP
drive. However, nearly all pre-installed versions of XP use the NTFS file
system. There are some pretty good free NTFS read/copy-only drivers for DOS
that can overcome this problem. See following link:
http://diskinternals.com/products/ntfs-reader/
There are other LINUX "rescue" distributions. Try a Goggle search.
Finally, there is Bart's PE builder. This can make an XP-based rescue CD,
but it requires (1) a working PC with XP, (2) a CD with XP SP-1 or SP-2, (3)
some patience. You might be able to make of these on some other PC running
XP. Link to Bart's:
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/