[CS-FSLUG] Copying laptop harddrive contents

[N. Thompson]

Some of you might remember back when I was trying to get the contents of 
dad's laptop's hard drive backed up onto another computer, unfortunately 
he decided to wait a long time before changing the distribution on it 
and since then I've lost the backup.

I know how to copy the files over with scp however his laptop is not 
taking an IP address, I tried assigning it one with hostname 
192.168.0.201 and it took the ip address but when I try to ping it no 
connection is made. Both computers have access to the internet so I 
don't know what the problem could be.

The laptop is running Debian woody, I've also got a SLAX live Cd that 
should have worked on it but version of LILO it uses to boot didn't want 
to run properly, I have no idea what to do now so I'm hoping some of you 
will have ideas.