Hard Drive Dead - Electrical Short?

Well, my, very old HD seems to be dead via an electrical short, and I'm not sure what, if any, options I have.

Last night, we lost power for a few hours, long enough for my battery backkup to go dry and shut my system down.

This morning it wouldn't boot up - it would power on for a few seconds then shut off. This seemed like something had a short, so I removed and re-added everything a piece at a time, till I isolated one of my HD as the issue, and removing it lets the system start up fine.

However, this is also my OS drive and my only boot-able drive (my other HD are SATA, and I can't my my system boot from them, though it's been years since I messed with them in that regards).

It's a very old drive, and I don't think (but am not sure) there is any vital stuff beyond windows itself, but since the machine won't run with the drive plugged in, I'm not sure if any data recovery methods will be able to do anything in this case.

So, am I just pure SOL, or is there any chance I might be able to get this thing running again long enough to get stuff off it?

Thanks.