[vox-tech] data recovery via linux

[dylan]

Hi!


recently we had a mysterious problem at work:

yesterday afternoon i used one of our win2k machines to do some regular
stuff. in the morning the machine was off. when powered up it acted like
there was no operating system installed. the dept. IT people took the hard
drive to their office and ran some diagnostics on it... they said that the
hard drives appears to be 'empty' to their tools.

the disk is a 20Gb NTFS formatted drive, that has been at about 95% capacity
for the last 5 months. i wonder if running at 95% capacity could have lead
to fragmentation of the partition mac... i picked up this crazy idea reading
a recent slashdot article:
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/19/1531236&mode=thread&tid=17
9&tid=182&tid=185&tid=190


so- i am wondering what the best plan of attack at recovering some of the
files from the drive via unix/linux tools.
1. is there any way to get data off of a drive that has a hosed partition
table?
2. if so, would it be possible to get non-text type files off?

any ideas/comments/etc would be greatly appreciated!

thanks!

Dylan