The hard drive died on our main family computer. I do not have the original restore discs that came with the computer. I do however had have a Windows XP Key for the system. I can get a copy of windows XP.

If I go into the bios and change the boot order to USB first can I run an operating system off of an external drive and bypass an internal hard drive for now? Then I could copy the external drive to the new internal drive once I have one and then go back into the bios and change the boot order again.

Would that work?

Sure, sounds alright to me.  Any BIOS within the last 5-7 years should support that.

You'd be able to run off the external with boot from USB - but you won't be able to just do a copy from/to and run from the internal.  The pointers would be all messed up - you could do a ghost of the drive to the internal… that would basically clone it.

Worked perfectly and I have the new drive installed and everything is up and running. However, I have a dead drive I need to get data from. I had 90% of our photos backed up on DVD but the last few months are on the drive along with some other stuff.

The disk is not physically damaged but has somehow become corrupted. It powers up and spins. I plugged it into another computer as a slave drive and it recognized it but said it needed to be formatted (which of course I did not do). I also used a IDE to USB cable and plugged it into the computer with the new drive and got the same results.

I was going to try the freeze method. Anyone had success with this?

Any other tricks or good reasonably priced software you've used?

Hmm…well, the freezer method will help you out with mechanical problems, but it sounds like you're pretty good on that front.  I had a similar problem once and I ended up downloading a package of cracked recovery software from mininova.  I then rested the hard drive on some bottles of vodka from the freezer and let the program do its stuff for 24 hours or so. Most of the recovery software is ridiculously overpriced because the guys that make them are essentially all umbrella salesmen.  I'll see if I can remember the exact piece of software I used, but it's important to try a whole bunch.  Not every recovery utility will work with your specific problem and it's hard to pin down exactly what you need.