File recovery

My friends laptop crapped out on him earlier in the week, and, being the computer guy, I got stuck with recovering his shit. Exactly what's wrong with the laptop is beyond me, beyond that it's BSODing with an "unmountable boot volume" error, halfway through loading XP. Since the computer in itself isn't really critical, he just asked me to get the files off it. In the end, I wound up using a xubuntu boot disk (I needed to burn one eventually anyway) and a reformatted thumbdrive (it wasn't showing up originally, but reformatting it on a working computer seemed to do it.)
So, 2 questions for ya:
1) Anyone know what could be wrong with the damn HD? It won't boot in regular, safe, or last good settings mode.
2) Is there any better way to get to the files in a case like that?

You could try making it a slave drive, putting some bootable master in and seeing if you could copy the files over from like windows explorer / konquerer etc. I did something like that for an unbootable hd about a year ago, got most of the data off it.

>>2
Well, the difficulty being it was in a laptop, an I'm fairly wary of fucking around with laptop hardware, as it's all pretty damn freaky. But yeah, I've actually done that a few times on my desktop previously.

>>3
If it's a 2.5" IDE drive, they make a simple adapter that you should be able to buy for $20 anywhere (online, computer store) that allows you to hookup the drive to a regular IDE cable on a desktop computer.  Hook it up on the 2nd IDE cable (with nothing else on the cable) and see if the BIOS recognizes it.

Tell him that he has now learned why backing up ones data is important. End of story.

>>5
lol, this too