Yeah... do you have an external hard drive enclosure? If you did, you could insert the hard drive and it would act like a big USB drive. Since you wouldn't have to boot from it, you could go into it, copy out the files you need and then reformat it... BUT, I am supposing that you don't have an enclosure... so if you are up to it, try the Linux LiveCDs. With the bad hard drive in, boot from the cd, and go to the file manager... look for the hard drive (usually something like "sda" or "sd1"), and copy the files you need to a usb flash drive. Yeah, but other than that I can't really offer much help any more... hmmm... I'll think some more about it! If I come up with something, I'll post it... Untill then... Hang in there!