>When I had a case few weeks ago, it was exactly the boot-into-linux that saved me. The disk which was allegedly unreadable by windows (ten bad sectors on 640G) and was sitting there for dozens of minutes doing invisible chkdsk, was visible just right from linux (at least the good partitions of it) and I managed to copy everything to where I wanted it. Then I hooked that disk as an USB drive and didn't turn it on until windows finished booting - and thus copied the rest from that partition. And guess what, even on this zip bang 8-core 16G system, windows takes about a minute to boot (and then when it's "finished" it keeps rattling the disk for a few more minutes), linux from a thumb drive boots in 15 seconds.

the boot to linux has saved me couple of times since the early or mid nineties when Knoppix became available (back then c't was heavy into supporting that), which fueled the "TryFromDVD" which has become the standard for some Linux distributions. The Linux bootable Desinfect available for a couple of years now and was responsible for a couple of fine diners, as I won't bill for virus removal with that toolset (no way to be certain all were found) - operators task is easy, and earlier backup of whole disk is no black magic with such tools.