once you get a new hd for the laptop, you might be able to put the old one in an external hard drive enclosure & copy the files, but if the hard drive is physically damaged (as it sounds to be) you're probably fux0r3d to the point that even a data recovery program can't help you.

i have a 60gig in an external case that i use for backup puposes or to share my 20gig of music w/ others.

here is the enclosure : http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...tem=5208227198

here is the hd : http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...tem=6777458030

once you lose 20gig of music you spent forever saving, you learn to keep triple-redundant copies of everything important