Shoutbox

well today i booted my moms laptop and it says..

Windowws could not start because the following file is missing
or corrupt:
<windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
please reinstall a copy of the above file.

when booting so i made a bootdisk to boot into it but i cant access anything other than the A drive =/


any ideas what to try?

its windows xp and a toshiba satellite laptop


edit:

whats a good live cd linux distro that would let me access the files / burn them to cd?