NTFS/booting problem

I have a Medion Athlon 1600+ with XP Home Edition.
PC decided to shut down of own accrod last week and I have problems since. On booting up i get the message "Missing or corrupt Ntfs.sys". Managed to get it to start in safe mode with command prompt once. Was then able to follow instuctions from Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 822800 and get the ntfs.sys set to old.
Pc worked fine for a while but as I was starting to back data up it crashed again. Now unable to get pc to start in any mode. Have tried booting from cd-rom but get various errors from corrupt ntfs.sys to unable to load setupdd.sys because of error code 7. Sometimes it goes past error code 7 to fail at ntfs.sys and sometimes it does not.
Unable to get to a C prompt generally. Only way i have managed to get a C prompt is by trying to boot from a Win98 recovery floppy and then select the "no" option which leaves me at C prompt. Problem is that I seem to be stuck in RECOVER part of C drive. Unable to view anything else. Only option I have is to run RETTEN.EXE to recover but I know this will wipe my C drive.
I just want to know if there is any way to get into the WINDOWS directory so that I can copy folders over to backup D drive (C and D are on same 80Gb harddisk split 40Gb each) or if there is any chance of recovering files if I have to run RETTEN.EXE and wipe C drive.
Any help will be very much appreciated.