Originally Posted by Rick Miley

If you're booting the laptop from an XP CD, then there should be an option to use the repair console. Once there, it is similar to a DOS prompt, so you can poke around the hard drive to see if some of the files are there. It also has facilities to repair the boot records.

As mentioned above, you can also get the adapter to connect the drive to a desktop PC. And you need not buy it on Ebay, I bought one at CompUSA a couple months ago for just a few bucks. It worked flawlessly and let me pull the data from a friend's drive that was in the exact same condition as yours.