PC won't boot correctly... just need to get info off

Ok, I'm not sure what to do in the situation I'm in. My friends Dell laptop has gone on the fritz. Basically it takes 20 min to boot, it never gets to the desktop (well it will show the wallpaper) but it won't do anything else. I get an error about explorer crashing. Leaving alone forever does nothing, and CtrlAltDel is ineffective. So basically we want to whipe it free, but first get all the HD data off. I tried just overwritting the windows folder with a new install of XP, but that errored everyway I tried it. It wouldn't let me [c] create a new partition either. So my only option is to whipe the HD clean and start fresh, but then I will loose all her data.

So how the heck do get the data off and onto something else? I thought about using an Ubuntu Live disk, and then just copying her files to an external drive, but I'm running ubuntu right now and it won't even see my HD (its NTFS). Pretty sure ubuntu has issues with NTFS, and yet it can see my 120gig NTFS EXTERNAL drive.

Anybody have any suggestions? Any help appreciated, thanks!

tLove

Try knoppix. It has worked flawlessly for me for stuff like that.
Or you could try installing Windows on another drive and sticking the original one in either an external enclosure or strapping it as a slave and using the install on the new drive to pull data. Then you can format and switch back to the other drive if you want. But you might not have a spare notebook drive laying around to do that, so I would suggest knoppix.

*Edit: Or you could install windows to an external drive and then boot off of that then pull your data that way.

Yea, I don't have a spare notebook drive and I would probably get a Dell technition guy there before I have her spend the money on one. So I'll check this knoppix linux tonight. I see thats its a Live CD so I'll test it out and see if I can actually see my C drive on my PC, unlike the ubuntu CD. I'll let ya know with results in the morning.