Recovering an XP system crash

[Jacko]

I am about to be given an old IBM thinkPad 600E to repair. It has a PCMCIA network card in it, type unknown, and a 6GB HDD, with only C: drive, no other partitions. It has an internal CD-ROM reader, and an external floppy drive.

The owner tells me that it has been giving a number of annoying error messages and crashes over the past few months, and now will not boot to Windows XP.

She has a lot of valuable information in her Doc and Settings folders, and a lot of AOL emails she wants kept. I am not sure where these emails are stored on her machine, but she assures me she can access them offline.

Where should I start? I have a Win98 boot floppy with CD support. I also have Ghost 2004 and Partition Magic Ver 8, with Rescue floppies. I also have a home network with plenty of space on drives on other machines connected to it, to take a complete backup of the ThinkPad HDD. Some of these machines have both CD and DVD burners.

My original plan, before the crash of WinXP, was to copy her C: drive to one of my machines using the network, create a partition on her laptop, transfer her original C: drive back to this partition, then clean install XP and MS Office again in C: drive, and slowly transfer files back. That way nothing would be lost.

However, without the WinXP on her laptop, I cannot connect to the network for the initial backup. I have not had much success in the past with peer-peer Ghost connections with similiar systems using the old Type 1 PCMCIA cards on my network

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.