xp home crashed

[Guest]

im a pretty advanced user, so dont mind getting technical

well im trying to fix a laptop with xp home on it, when i boot it all it
says it no OS available, i made a couple boot disks, and when i tried to boot
those it says invalid I/O, it wont book the windows setup CD, i did insert
and compaq quick recovery CD and it did boot up, but running the program
reformats the hard drive,

what i want to do it get some info off the hard drive, before i format , and
since it is a laptop harddrive i cannot just put it into my computer as a
slave drive,

i cant get a command prompt, F10 gets me into the bios, does anyone know
anyway i get get the info off of this hard disk?

 

[ChrisC]

Hi, create a bootdisk from here http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm that's
applicable to your file system. Then you can copy to a:, that's if the files
aren't too large.....
ChrisC