HDD Problems

[red_Marvin]

I'm going directly to the point:

I was running notepad, firefox, and scanned the HDD with
adaware SE when I decided to start fBIDE up.
Nothing happens.
Oh, well I thought what process has gone rampant this time and
takes up all juice now? [ctrl-alt-delete]
Nothing happens.
Hmm odd...
[Switches to Firefox]
Nothing happens.
[Notepad]
After thirty seconds or so the computer starts drawing the notepad
window, but never finishes...
After some time I grew impatient and cold-booted the piece of
rebellious electronics.
The red lilo boot up screen (After a miserable linux try-out not
going further than textmode) shows up and I choose winXP (hda1)
Afer unusually long time a message in german comes up with an
error text about reading (hda1) Either the winXP-boot stuff is
corrupted or else the partition is out.

Loosing data is not really an option, we have a lot of digital pictures
thate have'nt -it-never-happens-us- been backed up.

If the boot stuff is corrupted I suppose we can plug it into another
NTFS-machine and salvage the data from there.

But IF the partition is down and out what are my options?
Scan the raw HDD data for known patterns and file headers?

Arrgh >.<'' ...help... WinXP sp1 P4 2.6GHz 512Mb RAM

[shiftLynx]

Download SystemRescueCD: http://www.sysresccd.org/
It's a Linux distro designed to run from the CD; it will give you the ability to read files from the partition. At least you can access them that way.

According to the packages list, it comes with cdrtools; you can use those to burn the files onto some CDs.

Hope this helps.