There's no guarantee when it comes to reading from damaged filesystems, but I'd guess that it's not actually a filesystem issue and just a few corrupt files that Windows uses to bootstrap.

You'll probably be able to mount the drive in Linux and grab the stuff that you need.
If the FS is actually damaged and you have a later version of Ubuntu (one that includes ntfs3g or some other NTFS write-support (Hardy or Gutsy, I think)), you could even try to fix the filesystem by running "fsck.ntfs /dev/sda1". Obviously you'd replace "/dev/sda1" with the actual device.