If you can, persist with putting the dirve into another computer. An **extreme** solution may be to install GetDataBack onto the other computer and make sure it's running. Then boot from a floppy with your dud drive only and fdisk it, removing the partition. DON'T FORMAT IT AT THIS POINT.
Plug it in as the slave drive and reboot. Windows wont recognise it as anything until it has a partition. Use GetDataBack to rebuild the partition and extract the data.
I can vouch that GDB works great. I recovered 20+ gig off a disk with no partition.

you may be able to check the disk with GDB without removing the parition, but you mentioned that the other computer wouldn't start.