Do you want to recover the data really bad, on a low/no budget?
Crash course in common home data recovery practices:
If you really want to recover the data, and don't want to risk that a fsck might destroy some of it, the first step will be to use a Linux live CD, or know more about how OS X can handle this sort of thing. This may be too high of a learning curve. If it's really important data, pay somebody to do this, and then invest in regular backups for the future.
After getting in as root, use "fdisk -l" to list drives and partitions, and use the output to find your bad one (it works best if you only have two drives, and know both of their sizes).
So, let's say /dev/sdb1 is your HFS+ partition, and /dev/sda1 is whatever you want to copy to, mounted as /media/disk (this will usually be the default location for the first disk mounted using a GUI file manager from Gnome or KDE).
/dev = device directory
sd = scsi/sata disk drive
letter = unique identifier of drive
number = partition number
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/media/disk/image.dd conv=sync,noerror
dd = low level copying application (why is it named dd? I dunno)
if= = input file. In this case, the entire hard disk drive.
of= = output file. In this case, a file on a healthy partition (the above would be the equivalent of saving to say H:\image.dd). The name and suffix don't matter, it's just common convention to add .img or .dd.
conv=sync,noerror = pads any blocks it can't read with zeros, so that offsets are maintained (yeah, why isn't this default behavior?), and keeps going upon encountering an error, on the off-chance something lower-level is wrong. conv is short for conversion, and some options do do things that make more sense as conversions. You can get a speed boost by omitting this, so I typically don't do it, unless I encounter an error, at which point I add it in for the second attempt. IoW, just this (but, if there is a drive error, the sync option will be difference between saving your data, and corrupting it):
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/media/disk/image.dd
It can be reversed, like so, to get the copied image back to the drive:
dd if=/media/disk/image.dd of=/dev/sdb
Verify the target device is correct several times, because screwing that up can be exceptionally bad.
Now, for the second drive, blow away the partitions, and make a new partition in Windows Vista or 7, using a legacy partition table. Then, make the following decision: NTFS or HFS+.
If you own, or can at least install any software onto, your Macs, just go with NTFS, and get Fuse for Mac (newer) or MacFuse (slightly more Mac polish, last I tried). NTFS is a rock solid file system, there are excellent free data recovery tools, and chkdsk generally does a good job when TSHTF. If you can't do that to your Macs, then you are stuck with what you've been doing. I would still use a modern Windows for the partitioning, in that case, but then use a Mac for the actual formatting.
Finally, don't go blaming Asus for your PC locking up. 99% chance it's software, PSU, or RAM.