I have a dell inspiron 6000 with windows XP PRO (NTFS) installed and the computer hangs up during boot up. The hard drive seems to be corrupt. I read some of the sticky threads out here and the best option seems is to try and run the Maxtor Powerblast. However I fear losing some important data in my D and E drives on the harddisk. Is there any way I can boot into DOS copy some important data over to my external hardrive (connected through firewire) and then try this utility up. I tried Recovery console but I get an access is denied on most of the dos commands. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

The absolute safest option is to remove the HardDrive and using a notebook to PC connector (they're usually about $1 on ebay) plug it into a Desktop computer as "Slave" (ie where the CD/DVD usually goes) and backup (using just explorer) from there.

There is an even safer option. Without touchig your hardware I Booted my computer with BART PE and copied all my files over to an external hard drive. Easy and simple.

That works too...

But 'safer' is subjective

Tht's so true

Thank-you scorpsteals, I was hoping you'd see that
Yes there's stacks of bootcds I could have mentioned

booting Knoppix 5.1 worked for me;

see http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic76094.html

Ok after I recovered my data I tried to run a fitness test on my hard drive using the Hitachi tool that comes with Ultimate Boot CD which gave me 2 options to either repair the bad sectors or completely wipe the data out. While trying to wipe the data out it encountered an error and I had to quit the program. By this time my data was lost. I booted with the Windows XP cd and created partitions formatted and installed windows xp without any issues. After a couple of uses the hard drive behaves weirdly like hungs up in between, BSOD ... I tried running chkdsk using the recovery console and it threw me unrecoverable error. So what do you suggest I should do next?

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Oh and by the way, get another internal HardDrive