I know nothing of Linux but........

[Microspeed]

Recently I had a problem with a T43 and no sound. One of the really smart members suggested I boot with a Mint CD and it would tell me if it saw a sound card. It did not and I knew then that I had a Southbridge problem. I was very impressed with the whole thing. Now a few weeks later a friend calls me and is having a terrible problem with his Sony notebook. He can not boot except to safe mode. he is attempting to copy Pictures from his internal drive to his external drive. He can only do it one file at a time. If he tries to do by folder the systems locks up hard. He has ALOT of pictures. This got me to thinking, could I boot to Mint or something like it from a flash drive? (He doesn't know if his CD is working) Would I then be able to copy the Pictures by Folder to his external drive? I have seen someone use a windows live flash drive to do data recovery like that. So if I could do it with a free program that would be great. Can someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks

[Harryc]

There are many tutorials out on the Net about creating a bootable Linux on a flash drive...you are not limited to Mint. Pendrivelinux.com is a good resource.
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/install-li ... n-windows/

[untitled_no4]

Many distributions including Ubuntu (and therefore probably Mint too) include an app called USB Startup Disk Creator which is very easy to use:
1. Run the live CD.
2. Run USB Startup Disk Creator (in Kubuntu it's located under KMenu -> System).
3. Insert your USB flash drive.
4. If you're told it's required, click Format, otherwise skip this.
5. Click Make Startup Disk.
6. Wait a couple of minutes

and you have a USB drive which you can use as a startup device for running a live environment, although it depends whether your friend's computer can boot from a USB device.

[Microspeed]

Well as it turned out the notebook did boot from the CD. While booting it came up with a warning. Something about the hard drive health. The files still wouldn't copy. In XP you can do a MBR repair cant that be done for vista? or does it really matterwhat the operating system is?
How would I find out what the "heath: issue is with the hard drive?

[Harryc]

Download and run the diagnostic from the hard drive manufacturer...another bootable CD.