“Unless the old one mechanically blew you should be able to connect the old one to pull of your user data after the rebuild. You’ll have to take Ownership of the old drive’s partitions to access all the data.”
Uh... What?
It would be great if I could save the data — lots of music and ebooks on my old HD
You might just have a damaged or corrupt boot partition. What does the screen show when you turn it on? If it says something like "No operating system" that's better news than if it says "No disk drive found".
When you remove the old HD, you definitely want to connect it to another PC via a USB or eSATA adapter ( Newegg.com and Cyberguys.com are good sources for these) and try to browse the disk. If you get to that point and find your music and e-book files...it's quite likely that they are recoverable.
Also, if your HDD was divided into multiple partitions rather than all on C:, it's a good sign for possible recovery.
Most times when a HD ‘dies’ it’s just a bad boot sector, failure to load the OS, etc. The drive can be plugged into a USB 2.5 SATA drive adaptor (search for it), and plugged into another computer to access its data.
The drive will not recognize permissions of the User connecting to it so you’ll have to R-click and change the security settings to take ownership of all the files and/or give Everyone Full Control. This procedure can also be searched for a walk-through on how to do it.
First see if you can connect the drive via USB and read it. You could also use an SATA 2.5” external drive enclosure to put the drive in to read from it. But the bare USB reader is more functional as it usually has 3.5” and PATA connectors too.
Translation:
From the same place that you get your new drive from...get a USB enclosure to house your old one. When you have restored your laptop...plug in the old drive to the laptop and see if Windows can access it. If so, drag and drop your personal data from old to new. Done.
If not, buy a new, large drive to place in your new USB enclosure and use it for backups and images of your laptop, etc.