Originally Posted by Yngwie

Never heard of anything to recover stuff that will load right after the POST (could be something, but who knows)

If you can manage to get into windows with the hard drive set as slave DO NOT try to open it from explorer or any other way. Get software like Get Data Back by Runtime Software - http://www.runtime.org/. It's not expensive and works good to recover files.

I've used it a few times and it has always gotten all my shit back. The only time it didn't work is when the drive was not detected at all (bios and windows)

After you install it check if your bad hdd is listed and start the recovery.