Glad it’s just an annoyance now. Can’t always get to FR to respond, sorry. Anyway, not likely your Mac is dead, it can be revived with care (and a clean HD). You can do the drive swaps with a little investigation. A place I like is OWC (Other World Computing). You can find low cost external enclosures and hard drives (my preference is SSD internally, solid state drives); they provide install information, utilities and videos. It just takes patience, as it takes time to clone the data from one HD to another, and then physically swap them. As for paying someone else to do it, I don’t know as I do all my own swaps; you’ll have to research that. Google OWC or Other World Computing to find their online store.
I use a Voyager drive dock I bought from them, for inserting either 2.5 or 3.5 inch HDs via Firewire or SATA to do cloning. They currently have a low cost Voyager drive dock with a USB interface for $30, cheap. Makes it easy to swap different drives in or out without the hassle of a case enclosure. Or you can just buy a USB enclosure for the drive, anywhere from $10 to $30 depending on sales. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the data, the trial copy is free and I got it from OWC. Clone your bad drive, then tinker with the new cloned drive by reinstalling the OSX to regain your data. If anything goes wrong, you still have the original bad drive. In the worst case, you can create a fresh new drive and still import your data from the old bad drive. Your data is still there, you just need to have a good operational OS to access it. If this is beyond you, do find someone with expertise that will experiment with a cloned drive and not the original. I’ll say it again, cloning drives is easy but time consuming, but is good insurance. And a good thing to do for backups of hard drives having thousands of photos on them.
Thank you