Houghy you might want to give Spinrite frob Gibson research a try, if its not mechanical then it may be repairable. I usually keep a BartPE (like a windows livecd) that i boot from to retrive data from a non-booting but otherwise working disk. UBCD is another good one has some freeware tools on it that may help. Really depends what you mean by died.
I have recovered partial data from a drive that occasionaly produced a hammering noise and was unbootable.
Ghost is a great delpoyment tool but its not really what i would use for backup. Suggest you would be better of using your recovery disks from manufacturer and then doing a ntbackup of your system once configured to a backup file on an external usb drive. You can use something other than ntbackup if you wish. But this process has worked for me. Ofcourse you could use ghost to take a snapshot post rebuild to make reload of OS a faster.
Feel for ya mate I have been there to
Regards