I'm having a bit of trouble recovering data from a corrupted hard drive.

I managed to boot into it (with noapic and nopcmcia), but it's not detecting my hard drives. At all. I've tried various suggestions in and around this forum (which was a pain because the search function doesn't really work), but to no avail.

I currently have two hard drives in my computer. 1 formatted one that is split into 3 partitions (C, D, E) which has Windows Vista on the C partition. The other hard drive is unformatted. (The uh, formatted one is the one I am trying to recover data from.)

The only things I see on my desktop with the word 'disk' in them are sda and sdb. After some digging I verified that these were my DVD and CD drives, respectively.
Upon plugging in my USB drive it was successfully detected as sdc1

hda is apparently the same as sda - that is, my Knoppix CD. hda1-5, as well as hdab1-5 don't exist.
cat /proc/partitions returns:
sda
sdb
sdb1
sdb2
sdb3
sdc
sdc1

I really have no idea how to go about this. I also might be noobing this up quite hard, but I'm hitting a dead end here. Thanks in advance.

(If I've left out any crucial information I apologize in advance.)

EDIT: Hard drive in question is SATA, formatted NTFS