The only thing I can say you can do now is if you're lucky enough to have
another computer(s) at your house and they're all hooked up to a router, you
can network them (if your network driver is working as you did not specify
which drivers aren't working) and use the other computer(s) as your backup
source.
Additionally, if you have a spare connection available in your computer, you
can plug in a hard drive to backup your files. Also, you could plug in an
external USB (or the like) hard drive and use it as your backup source.
If you cannot do any of the above, as a last resort, try:
(everybody will think this is really a crazy idea, but I actually had to do
this to one person's computer once in an emergency situation; it's not going
to work for everybody as you'll see below...)
Download Knoppix off of the Internet, which can be run off of the CD ROM and
not the hard drive. The only thing is, if your burner is the only drive you
have, you will be out of luck. Another problem is that if you don't have
another computer, you'll have to use someone else's computer since your
burner is not working. You'll also want a high-speed Internet connection.
If you have to drives, however, you're possibly in luck. Knoppix has a
built-in CD burning tool, and you can use that to hopefully burn your CD's
and DVD's. I don't know how well it handles DVD's, but I know it can handle
CD's fine and have burned data CD's with it before. Now if the Knoppix
doesn't pick up your hardware, which I've seen it do on occasion, I don't
know what else I can say except for you to hope that someone else comes
along to assist you.
