I'll throw my 2 cents worth in here too.

I can't lose the data on that disk is so vague and uninformative that I laughed about it when I read it. MAybe it means the data is vitally important and I can't lose it, as long as I don't have to pay anyone or do much work myself. Sure, maybe it is important enough that a professional recovery service may be of use, but many times such services and not worth it. And I've heard of times that some small time "professional" operator gets a disk and then suddenly the price goes up for that data recovery, ten times or more of what was originally stated, supposedly because of the extra work he had to do to recover the data. It strikes me as nothing more than extortion. They have you disk, they may have your data, they know you are despirate, and now they will try to bleed you. Even if you manage to find an honest individual or company (and realize that you can't trust on-line references), there may still be a time sensitive nature to the data. If you are an author, for example, and your publisher's deadline is next Monday, sending a disk for data recovery and getting the data back in three or four weeks may do you no good at all.

The important thing to realize here is that this all happened under Windows. In addition to the fact that hard drives do sometimes fail, it is well know that Windows will frequently get into modes where it refuses to boot and the only "fix" seems to be to load the original software from the original disks and start again. In this case, where the noob said he or she had to borrow a XP disk, I even wonder why the noob doesn't have an original copy, but it's apparent that the noob hasn't considered the data important enough to make a backup, even to a simple and cheap USB flash device. Therefor, in spite of what was claimed, the data is not important. If it was important it would have been backed up. QED.

No one else seems to want to mention this so I will, 3.7 is too old to support an SATA drive. I've seen people talking about support issues with 3.9 and even 4.0.1 DVD and I'm not clear how well suported this drive (and more importantly it's interface) are by newer versions of Knoppix, but software that predates the hardware isn't going to have driver support in it.