LinuxQuestions.org - another lost partition table in Drake 10

P4 2.8e
dual boot lilo XP and drake 10 official

I was running XP and decided to dual boot drake and XP. After installing drake 10 and using it for a couple of weeks i had to do a few things on my crippled windows partition, but they weren't working because of a few things i was fooling around with. I went to do a system restore off the XP cd and as soon as i got to the option of where to install windows (where you then use automated system recovery) the drive showed up empty. I hadn't tried to write anything yet, so confused I rebooted to back some things up and do some research.... but it was already too late. I've read a bit about not being able to do anything unless you know the actual setup or have a backup.... but I want to make sure that some very Important photos for a final I have are backed up (pr0n.... right?) The photos are on the windows partition. I may buy a new drive soon anyway.... but restoring this soon is almost necessary for me to pass this class.... but if I buy a new drive I hope NT restore or something along those lines would work. Ive read of a few utilities that automatically guess the first partition and such but I definitly don't want to do anything that has a chance of destroying the data. The drake partition would be nice to save, but if it has to go then OK..... I just need the data from the windows partition. Any help is GREATLY appreciated. Thanks guys

also... right now the drive is in my second drake box.... anything I can run from nix would be ok too (and there are always bootables)... it automounts to the desktop as file:/mnt/hd
I'm a noob but not a total noob
If it helps at all there is also a powerbook in the house that I could use to do whatever needed.