Can't fix a crashed hard drive-impeding circumstances

I have an early 2008 Macbook pro 15" 2.4ghz (T8300). Now when it attempts to startup I get the white screen with the spinning circle but it stays stalled at this screen indefinitely. While the icon continues spinning theres also a constant clicking sound coming from the hard drive. I'm sure the drive is toast so I want to ultimately get it replaced but there are several factors that have me confused on how to do this.
I have the Snow Leopard Install disc, but unfortunately the disc drive malfunctions ever since the laptop was dropped several years ago. (This happened a good year before the hard drive began failing) So booting from the disc wont work.
I have an external usb drive that I thought I could boot from but would need to make a separate partition, thus losing over 2TB of music, movies, and documents.
What I think I should do...?: Buy a small SSD to replace the failing hard drive. Using another mac, plug in the SSD via usb and install Snow leopard onto it. Then plug the SSD into the Macbook pro via usb and boot from it to make sure everything works. Then install the drive internally.
I'm new to performing hardware modifications so is this the correct route I should take? If so, what products would I need to make it happen? any other recommendations or instructions are greatly appreciated, thanks.

The SSD drive will be a 2.5" form factor SATA drive.
The cheapest enclosure is USB only, but for not much more you can get USB and FireWire which will perform much better. For laptop drives, generally a Bus-powered drive is all that is required, and these often ship with a tiny "cheater" cable that pulls power-only off another USB (from anywhere).
The OTHER kind, 3.5" Desktop drives, feature a 12 Volt motor, so they generally require a larger enclosure with its own power.
Enclosure:
SATA drive inside.
accepts laptop 2.5" drive.
Firewire preferable, USB slow but acceptable for backups
power adapter generally not required, but "cheater" cable (USB to Power inlet) included is a nice touch.
no other compatability issues I can think of.

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https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5369545?tstart=200
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How can I fix my corrupted hard drive?

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There is suddenly a lock icon on my external backup drive!
Custom Permissions

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hi friend,
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Hi Glenn,
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Then you can download your purchases from your iTunes library by going to the iTunes Store (the one in the sidebar), Music, and then under Quick Links, Purchased.
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Hope this helps!
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Hi there,
My MacBook Pro 13 inch is 4 years old.
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Boot to the Recovery HD:
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As Bob says, that's problematical.
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http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7169808&
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Luke:
I'd love to know where the best place to get drives are. I'm in australia.
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cornelius

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I would like to know if you have to back up a macbook hard drive, can I use a external hard drive that has been previously used to back up several pc 's, or is it best to have a separate external drive for the Mac?

In the Mac side of things, backups usually come in two flavors: clones or incrementals.
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Can't fix a crashed hard drive-impeding circumstances

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