Data Recovery from Late 2008 Macbook Hard drive?

I have a late 2008 Macbook. It was recently dropped by a child, resulting in it no longer turning on. (It worked one time when tried within about 12 hours after the fact and then wouldn't get past the Apple logo and spinning wheel on startup). I brought it to the Apple store and was told they were 99% sure it was just a failure in the hard drive cable. Unfortunately, I received a call sometime later saying it was not the cable, but the hard drive itself.
I am planning on having Apple replace the hard drive, but I am hesitant to pay them the requested $99 to retrieve data from the hard drive (which they say they believe they could do). I do not have an up-to-date version of Time Machine because I had been traveling for nearly a year with my Mac and had left my hard drive at home and, of course, this incident happened right after my arrival.
I was hoping I could do something like Firewire Target Disk Mode using my iMac ( http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661 ), but cannot do so because my Macbook does not have a Firewire port.
Does anyone have any solutions? If my only option is to pay Apple then I am resigned to that, but as I already have 95% of my data backed up & I only want a few files from a project I had invested quite some time into, I am hoping there is a way to recover the data myself.
Thanks in advance for your help.

I may have missed it ... late 2008 there were still the plastic-bodied macbooks and the aluminum-bodied macbook. I'm told the plastic macbooks have a max disk drive capacity of 500GB, and the aluminum-bodied macbooks are good upwards of 1TB. An important point to check is the drive height. Normal is 9.5mm (I believe all WD Scorpio Black drives are 9.5mm). Some are 12.5MM and some are less than 9.5mm. See what you have today, and likely it's 9.5mm, so replace with same. If  you're in the US, you might confirm max capacity with OWC who also sell hard drives.
One other option .... a little more expensive, however, you could install a solid-state drive in your macbook. If you're able to use a smaller size, a 240GB drive is around $240 at OWC.  Significant speed pickup for disk operations. If you consider this, remember for capacity you need to allow 10% or more for systems usage.
Going from Leopard to Mountain Lion, you may want to upgrade to current iLife programs. The only one no longer offered is iDVD, however. If you want a Snow Leopard level of iLife, Amazon or hardcoremac.com should still have the iLife package available.

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