Just finished reading this when a Linux guru was on tech tv regarding the exact same problem - said he had to recover data from his sister's dead drive last night. He used a new Linux distro similar to Knoppix. Haven't used this but go to
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/p...462645,00.html to read about it and for links to the download. I recently downloaded and burned the Knoppix - STD iso and it has some drive recovery tools on it also. Hope this helps!