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Paul, are you absolutely sure your old hard drive is completely dead? If you haven't already tried, scrounge an old pc from somewhere, install the faulty hard drive and boot the pc from a linux live cd (or you can even make a usb pen drive bootable with linux and use that, see google for instructions), Ubuntu will do. Since you are booting from the cd and not the hard disk, the pc will boot, regardless of the condition of the hdd. You can then see if linux can read any of the files on the broken hard disk. It may need a bit of fiddling around and a few restarts, but you only need to read it long enough to copy the files onto a usb stick, usb hdd, etc. I wouldn't try to burn a cd,it takes too long and the broken disk might not last long enough for that. There are even dedicated linux rescue CDs with tools for data recovery, again consult google. Finally I have heard of people buying identical hdd off ebay and swapping the guts, just to get the data off. HTH.
Greg
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