If you can get the disk to at least spin up, and if there is physical damage to the disk, you you can try using the UNIX command
dd to physically copy everything as is into a disk image.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...50302225659382
For everyone knocking off Macs here, I use both Windows and Mac about equally. And every time I've ever had a sketchy/dead hard-drive (or CD, or other storage media) with either corrupt data or physical damage, Mac OS X has always been able to recover more of the lost data than Windows. (Especially if you go into the Terminal window and start using UNIX commands.) Windows usually stops reading the drive as soon as it finds physical damage, but Mac OS X is much more tolerant and will keep on reading the data, trying to recover as much as possible.
But to be fair, I'd assume that any UNIX-based operating system (including Mac OS X and Linux) would preform about the same. 