Yep. I had no problem doing that with CrunchBang/Transmission, but I wanted to try Xubuntu again and what ever I did, I did it wrong and it had unfortunate results.
So far I have had no problems recovering files, but the HUGE problem is that the recovered file names are not accurate, so I really have no idea WTF files I am actually recovering until I listen to them (It's mainly WCD/WFM) and most of the songs do not correspond to the listed file names or they are corrupted beyond repair.
In all honesty, I think my big mistake was rushing the initial repair attempt. When I booted in Win8 it reported the drive as unreadable, so instead of rebooting into Xubuntu and working from there, I just let Windows do its own repair thing and that may have just made matters worse.