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?

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