Plugged in iPhone to update, now MBP won't boot up

I have a MBP Unibody (late 2008) running OS 10.5.8 and a 3G iPhone - everything was working fine until today when I plugged in the iPhone to update to OS4.1 - iTunes wouldn't open and gave me a weird message about installing a new version. Tried again, nothing, but the computer froze, so I held down the power button to shut it down. When I went to restart - I just got the gray start up screen with a black apple and a spinning symbol - but it never got past that.
I tried starting up in safe mode, couldn't.
Then I tried running disk utility to repair the HD. No luck, repair failed.
So now, I'm trying to figure out how to get my data off my HD. I know I can reboot and reinstall everything (if HD is okay, this should work) - but like an idiot, I don't regularly back-up my HD. Now I'm stuck with a bunch of valuable info on that HD that I really can't afford to lose. How do I get it off there?
I have another mac, can I connect these two via firewire or ethernet and copy the appropriate files over?
Can I back it up to an external HD? I tried this, but I can't seem to get the "system drive" into the source field to back up. It won't let me drag it there.
What can I do other than pay big bucks for someone to pull it off for me?
Please help!

was able to get the system drive into the source box, but it still wouldn't let me back it up, which brings up my next question - if I remove the HD and install it in an external enclosure - hook it up to another mac, will I be able to access those files that way or since it can't be repaired, I'm S.O.L.?

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alphaflight wrote:
I've got about 300 GB of space, so that shouldn't be the issue.
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Plugged in iPhone to update, now MBP won't boot up

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