>Have someones hard drive that has a problem with booting up. It was sporadically doing it, now it doesn't come up at all. They are getting a new one, but I was going to try and recover some of their data. Are there any utilities that can help with this? It's not worth sending off to have done - nothing that critical - but I would like to try. If it won't boot up, is there any way to get to the data, or at least format to drive so it can be used as a secondary?

Hook it up as a slave drive or via one of those external USB boxes. I've been able to get data off of drives that way that won't boot. After the data is off, down load a burn copy of The Ultimate Boot CD. http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Run the disk diagnosis tool for your specific drive mfr. If there isn't one, then there is the general HDD Salvation Tool on the cd as well. You might be able to mark the bad sectors and get the drive to function again. Unless those tools say it is good, don't trust the drive and toss it.