Problem Resurrecting Old 486 Pc

I have an old 486 desktop machine that hasn't been booted up in some years. I recently decided to take a look to see if there was content I wanted to transfer to a newer machine, and it couldn't boot. The last O/S on it was XP Professional. I can get it to boot from the install disk. I got into Recovery Console and was able to do a few diagnostics. CHKDSK /R indicated that there were some (unspecified) unrecoverable portions of the drive. I also ran FIXMBR and FIXBOOT. XP claimed it was successful, but the machine still won't boot to the drive. I was looking for a boot/recovery .iso with a more comprehensive set of tools, and found Hiren's BootCD and Ultimate Boot CD. Both .iso's are too large to burn to a CD, and the machine doesn't support booting from a USB drive. I need a comparable set of tools that will fit on a 700MB CD. (I also tried EasyRE, but the machine just throws up gibberish when booting to it.) I'm assuming that reinstalling XP will wipe out anything I might want, so I'd rather avoid that if possible. Any suggestions?

 

Take the hard drive out, attach it to a working computer that has been booted up and grab the files you want.

 

Good idea, except that I don't have another machine that can access an IDE drive.

 

Hirens bootcd will boot from CD and let you copy files off the hard drive, if it is readable. You will most likely need an old 32bit version available here. Good luck.

 

There are USB to IDE adapters (that have 40/44) and SATA connectors), If you needed to boot USB, you can try plop boot loader.
Make your own XP era boot disk: https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/barts_pe_builder.html