el santo,

Knoppix is a fairly decent tool for data recovery off a troubled windoze computer. Boot Knoppix and browse around the hard drive partitions and see if anything you want to save is listed. If so you can burn a CD using k3b. If the system has only one CD Rom drive you may have to attach an external unit since you can't remove the knoppix CD and burn at the same time.

Good luck in your data recovery.

JP