hard drive mystery

[bechdan]

hard drive mystery - really need help please-

hi there, ive had a maxtor 20gb hdd running in my parents pc for a while now and its jsut decided to die, ive popped it in to my own system and it recognises it as a slave disk ok with the usual 1980605 bytes etc etc at the sytem startup but then in windows its only recognised as a 10mb drive with 6mb free space. Can anyone suggest a way to resolve this so i can save the data, unless the whole disk is buggered i dont know.
Ive tried chkdsk which says its fine :s

 

[LoTeX]

check what partition magic or fdisk has to say about it

 

[Nitestick]

my usual response. have a look and see if a live-cd of linux shows anything different.

 

[bechdan]

well no luck so far guys

partition magic allowed me to find out what id already found out using windows recovery console, which is that there is 19.8gb on the hard drive and that only 9mb of it is actually accessible at the moment, i have no idea why this is as i have not created any partitions or formatted the disk in any way, there is no clunking nosies either so the disk seems ok in itself.
I dont understand how to use linux live disks im afraid, any more help would be very very much appreciated as my mum has some of her MSc work on the drive she would like to retrieve.

Whats that I hear you cry 'backup??' too late methinks

 

[Nitestick]

try
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org