unmountalbe_boot_drive, chkdsk /r freezes at 36%

Hi everyone,

I’ve got a Dell Latitude c400 laptop with XP SP2, 512 MB of ram and a 40GB HD. It had been awhile since I used this thing.

Tonight while booting it up, I got the BSOD stating “Unmountable_Boot_Drive”. I tried running chkdsk /r with the recovery console and it freezes after 36%.

I’ve got some pretty important files on this laptop that I’m interested in recovering prior to trying a fresh XP install. Any ideas on how to do this? I’m familiar with removal of hard drives in desktops, but not laptops. Any suggestions would be great. Thanks.