Bitt's recommendation of an image is the best thing to start with. Then you can try any recoevery program and worst case if it messes up the drive, just copy the image back.

Something like Knoppix is good since it's a live boot CD and won't require any installation. I use it for this sort of thing.

Sounds like it's partially corrupted at least, so a simple undelete won't do any good.

I have had good success with the (non-free) R-Studio NTFS
http://www.data-recovery-software.net/