thank you for your advice.

i got XPUD up and ran rst:

25.8M Dec 17 15:50 /mnt/sda1/WINDOWS/system32/config/software
5.0M Dec 17 15:50 /mnt/sda1/WINDOWS/system32/config/system

25.5M Dec 17 15:23 /sda1/~/RP1/~SOFTWARE
4.8M Dec 17 15:23 /sda1/~/RP1/~SYSTEM

xp recovery cd may be corrupted. when it starts, it always gets hung up on corrupted files.