I wish the author had given the model of the HDD and pictures of the PCB and connector. I think it'll probably be reasonably simple to hook that up somewhere else to copy the data. I work at a place where we do this sort of thing all the time, even with 30 year old hardware or older, the problem is just getting out of the software solution box. This isn't a software problem and it requires a different sort of expertise for the most part.