How dead is this HDD ? ?
Indexing service if it can be found won't help much here at all as it will ony be a data file listing files and sizes...not the actual files themselves.
Actually, it has a LOT of information, but there is absolutely no way it can be parsed into anything useful. Most of it would probably be binary data stored from the various installed "IFilters" Word and OpenOffice(I think) both install IFilters and there are a lot of IFilter's implementations installed by default for several file types. each IFilter can store a chunk of data into the Windows Search Database (Indexing service in XP and 2000). This chunk of data is highly unlikely to be human readable or even in a recognizable data format, and is more then likely a custom persistence format created by whoever authored that particular search filter.
Either way, the location is off-limits to any administrator. the data is stored in the "System Volume Information" Folder of the drive: see
What's the deal with the System Volume Information folder?However: even if you get access to it, there is no way you will be able to easily understand any of the data that is stored. In fact it's unlikely to even have paths stored at all; who knows how it stores it's indexing data. it might store it by folder; it might even compress the entire thing using a compression format, thereby making the entire thing unintelligible.
