Sys Repair Disc does not load repair tools - just background

I'm trying to fix my brother's friend's laptop - my suspicion is he dropped it - the hard disc is almost certainly where the problem is.

That said, I hooked it up to my desktop and it's "usable" in the sense that I can access the repair tools via my W7 OEM disc to try and run utilities on it. The problem is that I'm probably going to be stuck running CHKDSK, and I don't want to tie my main desktop up to do this.

Now, the irregularity is that it took about 40 minutes to finally load through the dialogs and get a CMD open. After which, it took about 5 minutes for CHKDSK to finally access the failed HDD (G:, in this case). The first 9 file segments came back unreadable, so it's clearly not in the best way.

Anyhow, I'm trying to use his laptop to do this job so I don't have to tie up my desktop doing it. It will boot from the System repair disc, but it just boots to the background (that blue Windows 7 one) with a moving mouse. It could just be taking a really long time, but I was wondering if anybody could tell me how to get this working or if it's worth my while to wait.

If not, does anybody have any suggestions for how to get the data off the HDD?

Thanks

Try a linux live cd.

They are often better than MS tools for this kind of thing.

The HD might be too far gone already, but it is worth a try.

I guess I'll have to. The hard drive offers some access - I used a miniPartition boot disc and it can read most of the files on the drive - or at least, see them.

Not sure what is best for that. Maybe try parted magic - it is a small download.

Paragon free rescue cd is another possibility. It is only about 50 or 60 mb from memory

Normal Mode >File transfer wizard

I think Hiren's BootCD might have the ticket.

Yea, I gave up on that. The utility I found (similar to CHKDSK) found over 1299 bad sectors, and it was going up every few seconds. I don't think I'm going to get much off that drive.