How do I recover files off my damaged drive?

My hard drive running windows crashed and there are some important files I want to get off. I pulled the hard drive out and put it in an external case and tried mounting it, but it does not appear in "my computer" I looked on google and found "PC Inspector File Recovery" Software that says it can recover it even if there is no letter mounted in "my computer" I cannot find the drive on there either. Does anyone know any strategy for recovering my files?
Thanks in advance,
Caleb

Mac OS can read NTFS so no matter what version you should be able to read files.
I would put it back, then boot from Windows DVD and try repair/recovery, Vista does a good job if possible. It will probably want to boot into Safe Mode if you try to boot from it.
Does Windows share same drive as Mac OS? Running Vista? 7?
BEFORE a system or drive goes south is when you want to image it, WinClone 2.2 runs in Mac OS; or there are imaging programs or Vista's built in backup.

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