Well, the easiest thing is ususally to plug the "broken" disk into another box - see if it works, and run a bunch of drive tools on it. Personally, I think that Win XP's arte the easiest to use; that's what I'd do in your situation anyway.
Do you have a cd burner you can run from DOS? If not, drive swapping is probably the best way to get your files off it - unless you own an gigantic stack of floppies and can afford to lose a week of your life(!)
Another solution would be something like this:
http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/ubuntu-releases/w...e-live-i386.iso. You burn it onto a cd, and can boot off it. Once there, at least you'll have an OS you can burn files from / network elsewhere with. Depend's how Linux-friendly you are though!
From what you've said, if your computer is getting past the BIOS stage, and able to run some programs, that means that it's probable that only *some* of the disk is fecked - luckily for you, that's the Windows part(!) At least that means there's hope!
Seriously though - I couldn't advise drive swapping more -I've always found it the easiest way to do stuff like this.