There are cases where your operating system is not booting anymore but you really need to retrieve important/personal files.
You could boot a WinPE onto a USB key (using QuickPE and Rufus) to work locally on the faulty computer but you could also do it remotely, confortably settled from another O.S.
Here below the steps :
1-Lets make a WINPE out of windows (7 or 8) iso/dvd (I use QuickPE) .
2-Boot onto this Winpe (I use rufus to « burn » the winpe iso onto USB).
3-Launch DevIO : from the WinPE command line, type devio -r 9000 \\physiscaldrive0 1 .
Note : the -r is for read only and physicaldrive0 for disk 0 and 1 for first partition.
4-Launch ImDisk : from a remote host command line, type imdisk -a -t proxy -o ip -f xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -m X:
Note : replace xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx by the ip of your WinPE / faulty computer
5-At this stage, you should now have a new logical drive letter X: appearing on your remote host.
You can now recover your files remotely !