I had a hard drive die on my once. I could not access it at all. However, I had a secondary drive with BeOS installed (yes, this was some time back) and I was able to access the drive and transfer all of my files to the secondary drive. Perhaps this could be done with Linux (if you have another hard drive laying around). Or perhaps you could do it with on of those Linux distros that boots right from a CD/DVD (Mandriva?) and then mount and burn the stuff you need.