Copying access denied files in dos

My Windows XP machine started acting up recently and now windows won't load at all. I have a lot of personal files on my hard drive that I really can't afford losing so I've been using the recovery console to try to copy those files over to my portable hard drive so that I can reformat and reinstall.

When I look at the directories it says that all of my old folders and files have a size of 0 and whenever I try to access any of them it gives me an "access denied" message. Unfortunately the recovery console doesn't have the CACLS command that changes file permissions and it doesn't have the XCOPY command that would allow me to copy everything over.

Does anyone know how I can copy my files over to my removable drive?

Or does anyone know why all of my files are showing up as being 0kb and why Windows will sit at the loading screen and never start?