Real pain hey Greg
I've experienced this myself and more than once, no fun!
A word of caution, it's possible to have backed up a failing hard drive to only find out later that the backup is junk. (Currupt)
There are outfits out there that can retrieve data from a smoked HD. It ain't cheap though, they actually remove the disk or open up the HD and spin her around and read the data.... Saved my tail once, big time!
I was concerned about the info on the disk also,,, the guy laughed at me,,, I guess no one actually sees the data
Good luck