Help! My hard disk crashed

The kitchen laptop crashed today with a few weeks worth of unbacked up information (including pictures of the kids recent birthday party, and the like…) I tried booting off the XP recovery disk and running chkdsk, but about 60% of the way in I get an error:

“The volume contains one or more unrecoverable problems”

I have looked online and there a several “harddisk recovery programs”, but it is hard to know of any really work…

Any thoughts or advice for me?

Thanks