Use Recovery Console to copy data from hard drive to flash drive?

Hi,

A laptop of mine recently went kaput (the display adapter on the motherboard fried), however the hard drive was fine. I got a new laptop, and am trying to recover some of the data (mainly from the Users folder). Since I can't boot into Windows on the new laptop (obviously because the drivers are too incompatible -- the old laptop was a gateway and the new one is a toshiba), and Windows can't repair the installation, my only choice it would seem would be to use the recovery console to xcopy the data off the hard drive. After I recover the data I can then reformat the drive and do a fresh install of windows.

Now, the new laptop I got didn't come with a hard drive, so all I have is this one hard drive. I figured I'd be able to use flash drives to recover the data. Just xcopy with the data as the source and the flash drive as the destination.

However, I in no way can access any flash drives from the recovery console. The only drives I have available are X and C -- D is unuseable (understandably) -- and the only tool I know of that can manage drives is DISKPART, however that is seemingly for hard drives only -- not for removable media.

As far as I can tell the new laptop cannot boot off of flash drives, and the flash drive lights never turn on at all during the POST sequence or elsewhere. However, you'd think you'd still be able to load the drives up in the recovery console.

If I end up not being able to use the flash drives, what do you recommend as the best way to get the data off the hard drive? Thanks,

Jon

if you can get your hands on a copy of knopix that will sort you out with out having to buy anything Knopix is software which you can load onto a cd which will make your computer boot into a linux environment you will be able to transfer your files using that.

I ended up trying Knoppix Live first, which does NOT support NTFS -- so I couldn't access the drive.

I then tried out Ubuntu (which the default distro offers a "live" version -- no need to worry about getting a specific one) and it worked like a charm. Still couldn't copy data off onto USB -- as it turned out the USB ports ended up going completely dead -- but I was able to copy the data off the hdd onto the network. Mission accomplished.

Unfortunately, I tried all this out before your replies, so... uh, no thanks to you guys!

Honestly though, thanks for the thought -- I just came back here to say that Ubuntu did work for anyone else who has a similar problem and stumbles across this thread.