Recovering Windows Data After Crash

This must be familiar. My lab's Windows Vista crashed suddenly without reason and would not boot up again. Fortunately I had backed up my data (using Windows Backup) on a separate disk drive. I used an Ubuntu Live CD to boot and then I was able to recover data from zipped files from where windows had backed it into zipped files. Perhaps not surprisingly or surprisingly, I was unable to mount and access the disk drive that previously ran Windows.