looking for ideas

I have a laptop that belongs to a friend it's an Acer Aspire 1642ZWI.MI with windows XP (not sure what SP)
The problem is i can not access anything,when i boot it i am not able to get into the boot sequence (ie. safe mode) and when it loads after about 5 min the touchpad and keyboard are unresponsive,i have tried with external keyboard and mouse but it remains the same.
I have booted it with several live CDs and everything works normally but no matter what i try i can not copy or clone the hard drive or any individual files/folders,it keeps giving errors and stops the copying (i suspect the OS is corrupt.
I have not posted this in "malware" because i am unable to download or run any of the cleaning procedures,i have tried loading them from a CD and a flash drive but neither of these work so i doubt Chas/kestral can help.
I have run MBAM and Antispyware from the live CD but they find nothing.
He has a lot of documents and family photo's that he does not want to loose so putting a new OS is not an option at the moment.(this stupid man has been told by me several times to make a backup but he did not do it http://www.sherv.net/cm/emoticons/fighting/bash-head.gif)
If anyone has an idea how i can get into this SOB i would be very grateful.

http://www.sherv.net/cm/emo/angry/computer-smash.gif

Bill

 

You say you tried several live cds, have you tried Knoppix? It will automount NTFS drives. Maybe the USB ports are fubar, so you could try to connect to the net and copy to some cloud storage.

Just a thought...

 

I tried DrWeb/Hirens/Spotmau/Active boot and a couple of others but not Knoppix (I am downloading it now)
One of the strangest things about this laptop is it has two partitions on the hard drive (nothing strange about that) one is NTFS and the other is Fat which i have never seen before.

I suspect someone has been fooling around with this PC before it came to me.

 

From your description sounds like the hard drive is fubar (headed for the last roundup). Also sounds as if you can copy files, but when the copying gets to a bad sector it quits. Try a more sequential way of copying to an external device, first documents, then pictures, then music, et cetera. Take note of which file causes the stop error and skip it to move on. Hope he can get his memories back, keep at least two backups of everything here...

 

My first thought was that the OS was damaged but it will boot to the desktop after that nothing works.

I am not sure if the unresponsive keyboard and mouse would happen if it was the HDD being fubar? (of course i could be wrong)

 

Hmmmm...

Any chance of pulling the HD out of this lappie and with a cable, connect it to a desktop unit? then you might be able to save the data...

 

I am not happy doing that at the moment because the owner is not contactable until tomorrow.

 

Knoppix was also not able to do the job,it displayed all the files/folders in digital format.

The (c) drive on this laptop is FAT32 and the other partition is NTFS (which is empty) i have suggested pulling the HDD and coupling it to my PC but he is not happy with me doing that so i have given it back to him and advised he buy a new PC because this has come to the end of it's life.