Help recovering missign NTFS logical partition

So, I'm helping a friend out here at work and he came to me with a nice HP Pavilion dv8000 laptop. It belongs to his daughter. Anyways, the thing wont boot at all. When you try to boot it I get "safe mode" screen, and it tries to boot to the "XP Welcome" screen but then reboots to the same thing. Its an endless boot sequence. So, for giggles I removed the HDD and put it in an external drive to try and get in to the drive to save some files so I can run the HP recovery boot sector. When I plug the drive in to my machine it wont let me access the Logical partition with the OS on it. So, I took a look at the drive from the "Computer Management" window in "Disk Management". Turns out that the primary partition isn't showing up as anything, no file system at all. The HP partition shows up as FAT32, but the "C" drive is blank. So, I figure that the portion of the HDD that identifies its self is corrupt.

My question is, does anyone know how to recover the NTFS without reformatting so I can recover some files off the drive and then reformat it?

Thanks
Tim