awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww crap

My windows has shot craps, and now wont boot to the desk top. I think im going to somehow copy all of my stuff to a 4 gig hd i have. But is there a dos program, or a linux thing that i can put on a floppy and use to copy my files? Please help. I NEED IT!!!

Right now im going to try getting xp up, then making a new partition and copying my crap there.

Let's take a few steps back.

What windows are you running? I know win2k has an repair on the cd and I think that XP does to, you may try that. Have you tried to boot into safe mode and troubleshoot from there? Any new hardware or software?

If the partition is ntfs, only NT, 2k and XP are going to be of much help with copying stuff off of the drive.

well, ive tried reinstalling once b4, and its about time for just a clean wipe.

Also i want a program to create partitions from dos, or a version of linux i can do it from

well, for XP and 2k, u have the repair option. win95-ME id say dos is your best shot.

You could try this: http://www.startdisk.com/Web1/ubd/ubd.htm

which may help you, but i dont guarentee anything. this is best for installing windows quickly. Cuts it down to about 15minutes. (95/98).

For your partitions, i assume your familliar with linux since u mention it above, i would say try finding a copy of DiskDruid. Comes with the older versoins of linux for partitioning and formating. However the formating i beleive is just marked as format and isnt formatted until an OS is placed over it. The partitions went very easy for me.

Mandrake Linux 9.2 hasa GUI installation that can do partitions. it reboots once theyre written, so u dont hafta install it. Also, knoppix has become my best freind when fixing windows. Boots to a full gui linux from CD. Reads from NTFS, but can write to fat32. i used it to copy a bunch of pictures from a corrupted NTFS isntallation to my FAT32 HDD then whiped clean.

System Rescue CD is a great live Linux CD with all the drive utilities you could want. If you've never used Linux before, here are a few command line commands:

linux command - dos equivilent (if any) - usage - description

ls - dir - ls - show directory contents
cd - cd - cd [directory] - change directory
mkdir - mkdir - mkdir [directory] - make a directory called [directory]
mount - - mount [/dev/device] [where to mount] - "mount" a device (ie. "mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hd" makes /dev/hda1 (first partition on first IDE/SATA device) visible at /mnt/hd)
umount - - umount [mounted path or device path] - oppsite of mount
man - help - man [command] - show how to use a command and what it does
cp - copy - copy [file(s)] [destination] - copy files (use -R -p -v options for making an exact duplicate of a hard drive)
mv - move - move [file] [destination] - same as copying and then deleting the source file
rm - del - rm [file(s)] - delete (remove) files

Sys Recue CD specific
mcedit - edit - mcedit [file] - a basic text editor
partimage - backup - partimage - images hard drives to (a) file(s)
run_qtparted - fdisk - run_qtparted - PartitionMagic clone
links - - links [-g] [webpage] - A web browser (-g means use graphical mode) ([webpage] is optional).

To eject the CD after Sys Rescue CD is booting, type "fb800 cdcache" at the the boot prompt (without quotes).

To shutdown your computer type "shutdown -h now" or to reboot type "shutdown -r now".