wrote:
i think i looked on the cd and used setup.exe.

I would take another stab at trying to build a boot disk. You can start
he

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

If you can boot with a disk that will allow you to see the entirety of
your C: drive, that would be a good start.

How much data do you need to recover? Would it be too much to shuttle
out on floppy disks?