Not sure if this will be any help but a program called SpinRite by the GRC corp (
www.grc.com) is very good at analysing and retreiving data from hard drives. The main guy at grc programed it in assembly, it bypasses all the normal OS protection and reads the drive bit by bit, anlysing the realiability as it goes. It comes on a bootable CD. I'd use that to retreive the data, then I'd use a live CD to boot and copy the recovered data to a USB external.
I just had to deal with my gfs busted HD and this prog was a life saver. Good luck.