Recovering Windows 7 - some sort of Live disk?

Hi folks.

Dell sent a nice man to replace an optical drive in a laptop here. Apparently it went along with part of the OS - no idea of the backstory but in short the OS (Windows 7) needs reinstalling.

Before we do that there's a couple of files that need pulling from the drive. The engineer suggested something that sounded like a Live CD of some sort - Windows-something I think he said (some idiot - me - neglected to write it down) - that will let me access the internal drive and copy files from it to an external USB drive.

Can anyone remind me of the name of the thing I need to download and burn to a disc? The only thing I've managed to find so far wanted me to set up another machine as a "Technician Computer" which doesn't seem quite right somehow.

Any input appreciated.

Package name would be good.
A walk-through would be even better to save me happy-hacking my way to a solution.

Cheers.

 

Don't be put off if I suggest a Linux bootable CD. Providing you know where to find your files on the hard disk it's the quickest and easiest solution. Get Puppy Linux from HERE, burn it to CD and boot to it. You may have to do a bit of simple q&a first time but when you get to the desktop open sda1 (it's your hard drive C partition) and find your files. Plug in an external drive and just drag and drop.

 

Linux is my backup plan. I know from my little Linux experience that it sometimes takes a bit of coaxing to play nicely with some hardware so ideally I'd like to use the Windows one if possible.

Thanks for the Puppy recommendation... saves me a bit of head-scratching while deciding which distro to go for if I can't figure out what the thing was called soon.

 

Bart P.E. or Windows Rescue Disc. The Windows Rescue disk you create on the machine or another before things go bad. Here is some info on how to create an Emergency Windows Rescue CD/DVD. http://www.howtohaven.com/system/live-windows-rescue-cd.shtml

Some info on how to do a Windows 7 Repair/Rescue/Recovery Disk. http://www.shivaranjan.com/2009/05/20/windows-7-how-to-create-a-system-repair-rescue-recovery-disc/ Video at microsoft.com on how to create the disk http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Create-a-system-repair-disc

In case you get the error that you are unable to create the Rescue disk http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...windows7/67f57dce-9fba-4605-b2c1-fa09c2174326

 

Was it by any chance UBCD for Win? It's an offshoot product of UBCD (Linux based) that Major Geeks is a mirror for on a regular basis. I can't provide a "walk through", but since it's Windows based, you should be able to get the "hang" of it rather easily.