Ultimate Boot CD

I was able to create the bootable CD from the image just fine, and this is a pretty impressive set of tools -- but I am unsure of how to proceed...

My Windows XP Pro machine is experiencing a "boot loop" and I need to recover documents before formatting and starting over. I am able to see the NTFS internal drive if I boot to "NTFS for DOS" from the CD. But When I boot this way, I am unable to see the external USB drive that I purchased for file recovery. If I boot with UBCD4Win, then I can see the external drive, but the internal NTFS drive is inaccessible (and the Windows environment is dreadfully slow -- almost to the point of being totally unresponsive).

Perhaps I need to customize the boot CD to get where I need to be, or perhaps one of the available tools should do the trick, but I have not had any luck yet.

I do not care about restoring the bootability of the internal drive itself. I just want to get the files off of it and then rebuild my system. Perhaps I should go and get another internal drive to make life easier?

Any suggestions?

USB support from FreeDOS is still not perfect.

If you are not able to mount the external USB drive under FreeDOS, I would suggest hooking up an IDE HDD internally (beg, borrow or steal from a friend), formatting it using FreeDOS, then copying the files from your NTFS volume to the IDE HDD.

OK, I was afraid of that, but not surprised. That won't be an option for me for a couple of days at least.

What would be the easiest way to boot the PC and make the internal drive available on the local network (home ethernet router) so that I could pull the files off using my laptop?

You might wanna try "MSRRC". From the boot disk's website:

Microsoft Client, MS-Client AND MS-Server (!), USB/CDROM/NTFS/LPD, Remote Recover, updated drivers

thanks, but that did not work out as I hoped -- I'm starting a new thead for a different question...

If you've still got your original Windows XP install disks, I'd suggest using Bart's PE Builder to make yourself a bootable XP cd, which you can then use to boot into an environment that has complete NTFS compatibility as well as pretty good support for USB drives. You can then copy the data over using CMD or the built-in file manager, or even map to a network share if it detects your NIC. You can even run windows scandisk on the drive to detect allocation table errors, or regedit to check registry problems.

thanks for the suggestion -- I ended up being able to get the data off by booting with Freespire -- I was mounted the dead NTFS volume and copied the data to my external USB hard drive.