Malware cleaned, update to xp sp2 crashed?

hello, I had recently cleaned a friend's computer that had quite a few trojans, and other things (i did follow the steps in "read and run me first" thread). He had windows xp, SP1. It appeared that all was well, so I advised him to upgrade to SP2. Upon restarting, he received a stop error, booting in normal, safe-mode, and Last known good configuration. I dont remember what that error was, but the microsoft support site said it might have something to do with needing to update the bios for particular pentium 4's (his is a p4 3.06ghz) . I was able to update the bios, and the restart gave another bluescreen/stop error. This one, on microsoft support, (again, i don't have the exact error #) suggested that there might be a rootkit infection. My main question is, is there a rootkit scanner available to scan without being able to get into windows? (again, cant get into windows by either safe-mode, or normal). Another question is, He is upto reinstalling windows, but he would like to try to get what info he can from the drive, before formatting/reinstalling. what would be the best way to do this? I've tried various linux livecd's, and they are unable to mount the windows partition (I have successfully done this with ubuntu many times) . He does have his windows login with a password, and i suspect that this is why (ntfs security... ) so, yes, its sort of a 2 part question. I would put the logs from the previous scans, but I dont know if I can get to them... as i stated earlier, I believe (as much as possible) that the malware has been removed from his computer (cept for maybe a rootkit) and It was working fine, until the sp2 installation.

thanks in advance..

 

thanks, i will check it out some further, and see if i can't copy the stuff off...