It looks like the disk controller on my desktop machine went bad, corrupting the hard drive. Unfortunately, my backups also turn out to have been defective; the second IDE channel, on which I'd attached my DVD drive, apparently went bad a while ago.

Is there any software on the Knoppix disk to recover files from CORRUPTED drives? The problem is NOT that I can't get into the filesystem, the problem is that Windows managed to shred the directory structure. The "Desktop" directory is empty; several others are garbled. A few are ok, and the file data are probably still on the drive, just inaccessible.

Alternately, does anyone know some open-source software to browse the raw partition? Preferably with some built-in filesystem knowledge for VFAT/FAT32?

The truly hilarious bit is that I wasn't even trying to write anything to the drive -- Windows just kinda managed to scribble crap in random sectors all over the drive while doing its swapping nonsense when I booted up and logged in.

Thanks in advance!