Trying to recover data from damaged hard drive

Hi, forgive me if this is not the right place to post this.

About a month ago my hard drive with WinXP stopped working. First I tried hooking it up as a slave on another computer, but it cannot be recognized. Then I researched and found that Knoppix is good for being able to recover data from damaged hard drives.

So I have Knoppix 5.1 on a disc, and can boot to it just fine, but it will not recognize the damaged hard drive. I have booted to Knoppix with a good hard drive installed (just to make sure I knew what to look for). When I boot off the cd with a good hard drive hooked up, it doesnt take very long at all to get to the desktop. When i have the damaged hard drive hooked up, its takes a really long time to get to the Knoppix desktop (although it eventually makes it there).

I'm not sure if it matters, but the damaged hard drive shows up in the BIOS just fine. If I can't get Knoppix to recognize the damaged drive, am I pretty much out of luck as far as getting the data back myself?

Thanks

You might try testdisk under Knoppix and see if it can make any sense out of the disk. If you are very very lucky then just the partition table is damaged and the disk partition is fine, in that case testdisk (or gpart) can fix it. But, more likely, yea, you are screwed.