If it's just the drive (as I remarked over on Lis's blog), it should be doable to pop in a second drive, install Windows on that, copy the important stuff over, and pull the dying drive out. How big a drive are we talking about? ATA, I presume? I can probably do a dive into the junk box if it's not too large, and loan you something for a while[1]...since I have a tendency to upgrade stuff as it fills.

[1] "a while" -- "until I have a need for all of the half-dozen drives in there at once" :)