DC> anything at the lower levels.  IIRC, even booting into DOS 
 DC> gives Win protected file blockings.  

 ml> that highly depends on the DOS being booted into ;) O:)

 ml> i recently used a DOS along with a NTFS file system driver to recover
 ml> several gig of data from a non-bootable (lost the applications hive)
 ml> WinXP system... the process took many hours due to having to load the
 ml> NTFS driver in real mode (traditional style) and not having enough
 ml> memory to load laplink... i had to resort to using an even older file
 ml> transfer utility known as ZIP (not the archiver)... in either case,
 ml> laplink or zip, the data could only be recovered via serial port at a
 ml> max of 115200 bps (that's bits per second, not bytes)... 

 DC> sounds like a fun project that is only undertaken when the data is 
 DC> very valuable...  

one must remember that value is subjective, too... kinda like beauty and
the beer holder... to me, that data wasn't very valuable... however, the
challenge of getting the data off the machine was of value... especially
since NTFS security stuff was in place... good thing that the DOS NTFS
driver allows access to /everything/ O:)

)\/(ark