As I tried to tell you before your friend took your computer.... there are programs designed to pull the information off the hard drive, in order to save the information.  Don't quote me but I think you can also have the hard drive replaced.  It costs money though.

It does have to run to pull anything off of it.  Your programs are files - one thing you might try and do is the whole hard drive in the freezer trick.  Put the drive in a ziplock back and toss it in the freezer, let it sit overnight, pull it back out, hook it up and copy your shit off to a spare drive.

You can get mobile hds for not terribly expensive through an incredible universe, frys, newegg I believe that should work fine.  If you can't get anything off of it you can send it in to have the data retrieved off the raw platters but it's expensive.

Not sure who told you that you can take desktop hard drives apart and usually repair them, that is extremely difficult.  That is not trivial in the slightest and usually not worth the trouble. 

make sure you have it connected as a secondary and then copy whatever you can to the larger primary so you don't have to worry about it taking time to boot up/warm up.   or  if you have an imaging program that will make an image of the drive, so you can place that on your new 2.5" hdd. I used to use PowerQuest Drive Image, V2i Protector (PowerQuest was acqiured by Symantec in 2003) all the time at the last comapny I worked for and I still have all of that software I used. I was the one that they would let play with newer versions of different software before it was deployed to the field service techs. The drive doesn't have to be a primary to make an image. You can create the image (.pqi) on either a hdd or discs. Image can also be deployed over newtwork remotely. I'll see if I can find it and send it your way and hopefully it will help. I also had all kinds of data recovery software and there was a time when an engineer deleted all of his data...... and I recovered it for him.


if you're interested, here's a review of V2i Protector.