XP Media Center Problem

[countryboy]

I was the lucky person to receive a phone call from a friend of the family that their computer doesn't work.

It is the error that when the computer is powered on, windows will not boot and it says a file has been corrupted or is missing. They are computer illiterate and have not written down the file that is missing.

It is a gateway computer, and they never created a OS disk from the service partition on their hard drive.

Will my XP Pro disk work to do a repair on a Media Center version of windows?

It seems like if that doesn't work, the only other option is to put that hard drive into my computer, save their data and restore off of the gateway partition.

Any thoughts?

 

[countryboy]

I was doing a search, and found a thread in another forum where it was recommended to use a knoppix disk, and then use a thumb drive to save data to then restore.

I think they have a 8-in-1 card reader built into their gateway 818gm computer. If i use my 2-1 GB SD cards, will knoppix be able to save their data to the SD cards?

I only have a 128 mb thumb drive and this option would be much easier than bringing the hard drive to my house 10 miles away just to back up the data.

Is there a better disk than knoppix?