I did it before with a desktop, but just transferred files from a virus infected hard drive.
It is a 3 month old Dell under warranty. I hooked up a digital tablet for drawing. When I turned on the computer the next morning to use it, windows would not boot. Dell is sending a new hard drive, but I have a program on there that can only be installed once, and I will probably have to buy it to put it on the new hard drive.
Yes, you can take files off a damaged or dead hard-drive and transfer to a good hard-drive.
you should try a program called spinrite, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite
does amazing things for recovering data and fixing harddrives.
you could put the hard drive on a 2.5" hard drive enclosure with usb conection and conect it to any computer and save the files on the other computer or just conect it to another labtop witout the HDD enclosure which ever you prefer
if the above posters thing doesn’t work just open up all your folders and files for network sharing and you should be able to copy them to a different hd for storage until u get your new one.
download it by utorrent then you dont have to buy it again
Open up your laptop and take out your hard-drive and connect the serial ata connection to a desktop and open it as you usually would and copy the program files and copy them to the desktop, then connect your new hard-drive and copy the files on to it and your done