Running out the door my foot grabbed the wire and my laptop to the floor. The hard drive ended up being the problem with the boot. Hard drive still spins so I know there's hope! Looking, I didn't find any data recovery programs for Ubuntu that I think could recover this particular data for me. And even if there was, the hard drive was running Windows 7 Home Edition and 6 years of data (some of which I paid for) from it.
So I figure it's probably best, since it's Windows 7, to run a Windows based data recovery program to best pull it off so I can convert all my 6 year prescious onto my new Ubuntu 12.04 only box.
Does anyone have any easy fast ways I can approach this with?