Unmountable_boot_drive Toshiba laptop

A friend has dropped his laptop off (Toshiba A70) and it has this error-
UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT _DRIVE
STOP: 0X000000ED (0x84FD9D68, 0xC0000006, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)
This bluescreen error comes after the xp loading screen, it doesn't get to "welcome" screen.
Same error in safe mode.

Now having read about this I have tried the following.
Booted from a XP pro SP2 disk (Not sure if the laptop is Pro or Home- could this be a prob?)
I get to the repair console, but when I run chkdsk /p, it only gets to 20% or so and then reboots.
I then ran chkdsk /r as per m$ instructions, and it does the same, about 20%, reboots, no problem fixed.
After reboot I ran fixboot, it tells me it has written a new boot. but nothing changes again.
The Toshiba recovery disk says it will destroy all data, but there is files we'd like to recover.

Would the Pro/Home difference be a problem here? He doesn't know what version or service pack is installed.
How do you tell if it's home or pro?
I have a service pack 1 disk, or I could slipstream sp3, If that could be a problem.
Where can you find a Xp home bootdisk on cd, no floppy drive in the laptop?

Apart from removing the hard drive, which i dont want to do, which would be the next step in fixing windows/retrieving the data? Ubuntu liveCD ?

It's just got me stuffed why chkdsk doesn't complete.
Cheers

Not necessarily. What you can do is remove the hard disk from the laptop, and place it in a 2.5" hard disk enclosure. That will allow you to connect the drive to another computer through USB, and copy files off it.

Then you can return the hard disk to your laptop, and reformat it when you try reinstalling XP.

Boot from a Windows XP CD and get into the Recovery Console. (R at the first prompt.) From the command line, run "chkdsk c: /p/r" until there are no errors and then reboot.

Grumpy