For what it's worth, here's a commented slide show of using an in-house Rescure CDR based on Bart PE Builder:
http://cid-c7dab1e724ab8c23.photos.live.com/play.aspx/.res/C7DAB1E724AB8C23!197?ref=1The project includes various scanners, integration management tools with registry redirection, de-bulking Temp and TIF, harvesting registry hive backups from SVI and so on.
The session starts by checking the hardware first; building a MemTest bootable diskette from the "diskette factory", using HD Tune to check the physical hard drive, then ChkDsk.
Not shown are the data recovery tools and other utilities. The project CDR shown is from 2005; it's come on a bit since then

The comments to these slides explain what is going on!
BTW, my "Live Spaces" site is no longer active in terms of new content or comments. As a host, I found Live Spaces unacceptably poor at managing comment spam, and switched to my original Blogger and newer WordPress sites instead.