Recover That Data

Another day, another laptop that has crashed - gee I just gotta love M$ stuff - it's just so reliable, ain't it ?. Boot a 'nix live_cd and look at those partitions. Gee - what's that? A yellow triangle against the C: drive - that's SDA3 - ain't it? Must be, as that little, boot, partition is SDA1. No that's not right - SDA1 is PQrecovery, SDA2 is boot, SDA3 is C: drive. That's better. No it's not -the live 'nix cd can't read the partition's data - rat's that means that I can't copy out this person's 'valuable data' . & a few hours later & I still can't find a way to run chksdk /f in a cli environment.- I was always under the impression that a 'nix disk would read the data directly from the disk - but maybe it does need the file table to be not corrupted. & a day later - & I'm still trying out those 'data recovery' s/w that's advertised everywhere. & why do they all have to be run under a working M$ o/s?? - there's not too many stand-alone CDs - of any o/s - that will do that recovery thing. a dedicated PC, with one of those s/w installed onto it, seems to be the most common option - sad.