Your Mac didn't die, the HD did. Stick a new one in and your good to go again. And if you had used a second HD and made a bootable clone and updated frequently it is easy to transfer the entire system to your new HD that I assume as HD1. My Mac has 4 internal drives with two cloned bootable as backup. Almost never had any failure. Only problem is unless you copy your emails and bookmarks to a flash drive you would loose current emails from time of crash to current date.
I had a HDD go bad, nothing was recoverable.
Got a new HDD installed and installed Ununtu linux and never really looked back.
And that's a good reason to run Time Machine in the background on your Mac. Automatically backs up changes every hour. So you could potentially lose only emails generated since the last backup within up to an hour. That's if you don't have them instantly captured to a cloud, so no emails would be lost. When I clone a new drive I temporarily disable email until the drive shows its working out (as in applying big OS or software changes). If okay, the old drive becomes the new fallback drive. Always good to have a fallback drive that you can restore latest files from Time Machine backups, just in case.
Have had no drive failures on my Macs, although I've lost about five on my Windows PCs over the last ten years, curious thing.