[TriLUG] NT 4.0 backup, knoppix, other ideas?

[gregbrown at mindspring.com]

A good friend has a NT 4.0 machine in bad shape.  It won't load drivers and constantly complains about "the security subsystem" not starting.  I've tried to load LAN drivers for a 3Com PCMCIA card but it doesn't work - neither does loading drivers for a 802.11b card from Lucent.  Reloading the OS from an old NT 4.0 CD doesn't work either (more blah blah about the "security subsystem").

The problem here is he has about 650 megs of data from his MBA program he would like to have saved.  Without being able to load any drivers for network cards I'm outta luck with a network backup.

Is there any way to boot Linux from a CD with network drivers and get to the data on a NT partition?  I think the partition is NTFS, but I'm not sure.  This is the only way I can think to get the data from this machine without being able to load drivers and without a CD-RW.  

Has anyone tried booting a Linux distro and getting to NT data?  Is this even possible?  Does anyone have any other ideas?

Greg