After two months it became clear that about 10% of the disk is physically unreadable, so I stopped Spinrite's eternal struggle.
I then used
testdisk which managed to find the partition table (after EASEUS failed to do so) and copy off the entire contents of the documents and settings folder, which thankfully was outside the corrupt sectors.
The program said that the boot sector does not match the backup boot sector. I then attempted to restore the partition table, the software said it was "unable" to write a new one. I assume this is a hardware fault as the software is supposed to be able to handle NTFS.
I chose to save a disc image in the hope that if I write that to a physically OK drive I can then do the recovery on that. However, the file is a .dd format and I'm completely lost at sea and out of my depth...
