For a situation where a PC drive will not boot, but the drive is still operational, we have come up with a free solution:
Instead of removing the drive and installing it as a slave in another system to recover user data, you can boot to a Linux “Live CD” and access the bad drive with it in the original system. This is particularly useful for laptops, where removing the drive can be a chore.
The Linux Live CD (we find Lindows Live! particularly easy to use for those used to Windows) mounts NTFS and FAT/FAT32 partitions and gives USB device and network access if you have a suitable network account. Hardware detection is generally very good.
You cannot run chkdsk, etc. from Linux, and I have not used it in an AD environment so I cannot vouch for that; otherwise, it works very well.