You did not say what the problem is with your hard drive.  If it is the case that it has become 'unbootable' because the operating system got corrupted  it might still work as a data disk.  In that case you might try bringing it up in an external usb drive such as 'Thermaltake'.  Similarly it might be worth attempting a recovery effort for the data and not worry about the operating system, but obviously after a major crash I would not trust a disk for the long term.

I once had a HD that crashed. I Ghosted the drive to a clean disk even though it was corrupt (never work on the original disk if the data are important - make sector by sector copies and work on them). It took me three tries in learning what settings would work, but I got the data back and then quickly transferred it to another HD. If I remember correctly it was exactly your scenario, but with my Poser 7 set-up.

I say 'Ghost' but it might have been from an equivalent program. 'Ghost' used to be the gold standard.

You might take a look at some of the utilities that come with UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD, which is actually a DVD). Once you get your new disk working make an ultimate boot cd for your computer. The way it works is you follow their instructions to get what is needed from your computer for booting and then add some of the 'free' utilities of your choice to your Ultimate Boot CD for your computer.

When that's done you can boot your computer without any hard disk in it at all. It will be slow, and you may have to call out to create a virtual disk made of your hardware's ram memory, but it should work.

Once you're running try some of the disk clone programs they offer (I vaguely remember a "true"-something or other disk clone) and try cloning your old HD to a clean one that is either new or good used.

Here's the link to the UBCD site:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/