laptop harddisk with bad sectors

I just came across knoppix and was told i might be able to use it to recover the data from the laptop drive. The notebook was running Windows XP Pro with FAT32 partitions. It no longer boots and after running the HD diag it found several bad sectors.

I booting knoppix but it freezes when it finishes creating /etc/fstab. It never gets to the login screen. Is the HD just that badly damaged? I've looked at imaging the drive to see if i can recover the information that way but the laptop has a DVD-ROM and no cd-rw. It would take a signficant amount of floppies.

Any suggestions ?

Thanks in advance

Have you verified the integrity of the cd? Try using the "testcd" option when you first boot.