A PC that refuses to start feels like total loss, but in most cases only Windows is broken - the hard disk and your files are fine. A Linux live session boots from USB, opens the Windows drive like a folder, and lets you copy your data to safety before any repair begins.
This is the rescue job live tools exist for. The rule is simple: data first, repairs later. Booting a Linux live ISO from your Ventoy stick gives you a calm, working desktop that reads the Windows drive from the outside. Nothing is installed, nothing on the sick disk is changed by booting - and once your photos, documents and office files are copied to another disk, every repair option becomes stress-free.
Connect an external hard disk or a second large USB drive with enough free space before you start. Files must land on a different physical disk than the one you are rescuing from - copying data onto the same failing drive is no rescue at all.
Also listen to the sick drive while the PC powers on. Clicking, grinding or repeated spin-up sounds mean mechanical failure. In that case stop, keep the drive powered off, and read the cloning guide first - a dying disk may only survive one careful copy run.
Users and then into your user folder - Desktop, Documents, Downloads and Pictures hold most of what people actually need.Sometimes Linux opens the Windows drive as read-only, or warns that the volume is in an unsafe state. The usual cause is innocent: Windows Fast Startup leaves the drive in a hibernation-like state instead of shutting it down fully.
For a rescue copy this is mostly good news - read-only is all you need to copy files out. Do not force write access to a hibernated Windows volume; you can corrupt it. If you truly need to write to the disk later, that is a job for after Windows itself has been shut down properly or repaired.
Copy the irreplaceable things first, while the disk is still cooperating:
Let each batch finish and check that the copied folders open on the destination before moving on. If copying slows to a crawl or throws errors on every file, the disk is failing under you - stop copying file by file and switch to the cloning approach instead.
If the Windows drive is protected with BitLocker, the live session will see a locked volume it cannot read. This is encryption doing its job, and no rescue tool can bypass it - you need the 48-digit BitLocker recovery key, which for many home PCs is saved in the owner's Microsoft account.
With the key, some Linux tools can unlock the volume; without it, the honest answer is that the data stays sealed, and the correct next step is repairing Windows itself so it can unlock its own drive at the normal sign-in.
Watch the full video to see the rescue toolkit in action on a PC that will not boot - including how the files are pulled out safely.
▶️ Watch Full VideoNo. In the live session you are only reading the Windows drive and writing to your external disk. Windows itself is not started or modified by copying files out of it.
Either the drive has failed electronically, its partition table is damaged, or it is BitLocker-locked. A disk that does not even appear is a hardware-level problem - cloning tools or a professional recovery service are the next step, not more file copying.
Yes. NTFS read and write support is built into mainstream live distributions and is reliable for normal drives. The read-only cases you may meet come from Windows hibernation (Fast Startup), not from NTFS itself.