OpenBSD, NetBSD and possibly others have bootable cd kernels you can burn to a cd and boot your laptop from. This should give you all the stuff you ned to recover your hard drive with. And no, you don’t have to download the whole distro for this. For OpenBSD the bootable cd image is called cdrom32.fs . You can download from a mirror site. Go to openbsd.org if you want more info. I’d expect any current distro to have similar options though.
Just had a flash of genius, and wanted to check with some actual genii (?!) before attempting. I mentioned my new $10 laptop? That has a built in diskette station (my attempts at burning bootable CDs have so far failed miserably and horribly).
Can I remove the HD from the present laptop and put it in the other to work on it? One is a 233mhz and the other is a 300mhz so they are close enough in generation.
The only quesiton is, is it possible in any way for the screwy-harddisk to do anything to the other laptop i drop it into? Could it harm, damage, feck up the other laptop in some way?
I can’t think of any way a screwed up hard drive will hurt any other component of a computer.
I’m curious about your lack of success in burning bootable cds.
What software are you using? I’ve used easy cd creator and have never had a data cd fail though music cds haven’t always been up to snuff.
Have you tried downloading an iso image of a linux distro and burning that to cd?