Cannot Boot to Mac HD - How Can I Copy Files?

Hi,
My Mac Pro (2008) had become really sluggish, and after getting the Beach Ball all the time and hanging on the grey Mac logo screen, I tried to repair the disk with Disk Utility from the Snow Leopard Install CD. It told me it could not repair the main HD and I need to backup, reinstall OS X, etc. Which is fine, I've been meaning to start over, but does anyone know:
I just want to copy over a few files from the Mac HD (most of my work is on other drives). How can I access those files and copy them to my external/secondary drives? I didn't see a way for running Finder in Install CD.
Thanks,
Bduffy

There are several ways to back up a Mac that is unable to fully boot. You need an external hard drive to hold the backup data.
1. Boot from your recovery partition (10.7 or later), a local Time Machine backup volume (10.7.2 or later), or your installation disc (10.6.8 or earlier.) Launch Disk Utility and follow the instructions in the support article linked below, under “Instructions for backing up to an external hard disk via Disk Utility.”
How to back up and restore your files
2. If you have a working Mac, and both it and the non-working Mac have FireWire ports, boot the non-working Mac in target disk mode by holding down the key combination command-T at the startup chime. Connect the two Macs with a FireWire cable. The internal drive of the machine running in target mode will mount as an external drive on the other machine. Copy the data to another drive.
How to use and troubleshoot FireWire target disk mode
3. If the internal drive of the non-working Mac is user-replaceable, remove it and mount it in an external enclosure or drive dock. Use another Mac to copy the data.

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