Ultimate Boot CD

Hi, I need to salvage some files from a Vista installation on a notebook PC.

I've booted UBCD a few times to try and find a working DOS prompt. Two of them give me an "Invalid opcode", one freezes with the message "Supported int 13" or something similar, and the one that DID work now freezes at "booting".

FreeDOS gives me an opcode, and I read that it can be used to enable support for a USB flash drive.

I basically need to boot into a prompt, copy some windows files to my flash drive, and be done with it. Can anyone help me out?

I'm going to take a guess and say that all the problems, and the fact that I can't boot -anything- is due t the fact that this computer has a SATA hard drive not emulated as IDE, and no option to enable such.

I only need to boot to a prompt where I can work with NTFS files and copy them to my flash drive. Any help would be appreciated.

:edit:
Freedos Opendos, and NwDsk all give the "invalid opcode" error, and lzdos freezes at "booting..."
I had one prompt working previously but I forget which. I think it was LZdos with vc, but I couldn't get to my flash drive and my whole endeavour was pointless at that point.

I would suggest using a Linux Live CD like Knoppix or any other of the many distros out there.

Download puppy linux from http://www.puppylinux.org (<100MB).
It let you easely copy files from your hard drive to your USB stick.
It also contains gparted which is a partition tool. It let you shrink your current Vista partition and let you make a new partition at the end of your drive so you can backup all your data in the future on that second partition so when you reinstall windows you don't loose all your files.

Alright, thanks for the replies. I'll be trying soon