Macbook pro hard drive problem- failed? worth it?

yesterday my computer froze. so i manually restarted it. it now get stuck at the gray screen for a good 10 minutes and then the blinking question mark/folder appears. when i boot it from the CD, disk utility sees the drive but says "unmounted". i can start the computer on firewire mode (this also takes about 10 minutes of holding down "t" before the gray screen goes away and firewire logo appears) but i didnt have the correct cables to attach it to my friend's mac to see if i can actually recover some data through firewire. seems unlikely though. the computer is still under warranty. most everything is backed up except for 5 years worth of emails that i had to download off the internet when my university cancelled my email address. i want my emails/recent documents pretty badly....
does the following sound like a good idea?: i have the apple guys replace my drive (so i have a working computer). i keep the replaced hard drive, put it in an enclosure, hook it back up to my computer and try to recover data then (disk warrior etc or freezing it). ALSO, is putting the old drive in an enclosure really difficult? i used to install memory cards on my desktop pc before but thats about all the experience i have with hardware. what do you think my chances of data recovery are?
edit: just found out that if i wanna keep the old hard drive i would have to pay for them to replace it, although its still under warranty.....i definitely wanna keep my costs to a minimum....so what if i buy an external hard drive, load the OS on in, and then try to do some data recovery from the original hard drive like that? would that work?
Message was edited by: harddrivefail

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
The best deal would be to try to recover your data before you send your Mac off to have the failing drive replaced. I gather you have most of your stuff backed up, but not the most recent emails and documents, which you really do not want to lose.
Here is something you can try. Go ahead and buy a new external hard drive--one at least the same size as your internal drive. Get a firewire cable and your friend with the other Mac. Using FireWire Target Disk Mode, mount your drive on your friend's desktop. Also mount the new drive on your friend's desktop.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661
Then use a cloning utility like Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your internal drive onto the external drive.
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
You can download either of these to try out for free as often as you like. If you want to unlock Super Duper's more useful features like Smart Update, you can register a copy for $28. CCC is donation ware.
Once you have made the clone, boot from it and see that everything is OK and that all your recent data and emails are there and intact. If they are not, you may need to try a data rescue program like Data Rescue III.
The clone you create will be an exact copy of your internal drive. Once you have created the clone, you don't need to worry about your dying drive--you can let Apple replace it. When you get your Mac back, you can probably just clone back from the external drive to the internal.
It may be that the dying drive will not let you make a good clone, but you may still be able to end up with copies of your documents and files. If you are worried that the clone may be corrupted and maybe untrustworthy, you can always restore from your older backup and then just add the more recent stuff from the clone.
If you can, buy an external drive with both USB and FireWire capability. Once you have the new internal drive installed and your data on it, you can still use your new external drive for backup.
Good luck!

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