Laptop Issue on a Deadline

[Queequeg]

My laptop has recently failed to start.  It goes to Windows auto-repair, where it finds nothing, and suggests that I purge the harddrive, but I really, really need to at least back some stuff up on there before I leave on Thursday. 

It is a Vista machine, maybe 3 years old.  Really, really need to rescue some stuff.  Suggestions?

[Cerr]

I had something similar happen to me.
Buy a 2.5 inch hard drive enclosure, take your hard drive out of your laptop and put it in that. Connect it to another computer and get your data off the hard drive.

That worked for me anyway, it allowed me to get all my data off it.

[Vricklund]

Start from a linux live cd (e.g Knoppix) if you don't want to open your case. Just burn/copy your files from there.