re: Any hard drive / data recovery experts here?

You could put the hard drive into an external (USB) hard drive enclosure. If the main computer can't read it, you can use a free program called Recuva to access the data and copy it all to a folder on the new computer. Then you can go to the command prompt to move all the photos to their own folder using wildcards (ie *jpg and *gif). Same for documents (*doc). A duplicate cleaner can erase all the unneeded duplicate files.

Only downside to that method is some programs won't work anymore because they depend on certain files being in the right place.