So you have a second hdd and can boot from that then? Not sure about the state of your failed drive... If you can see the file system with your working one th

So you have a second hdd and can boot from that then? Not sure about the state of your failed drive... If you can see the file system with your working one that's one thing (see what to copy farther below), if it's unreadable right off then you need to have some emergency thing. For repair disk you could create a bootable linux rescue disk image on a USB flash drive and if its big enough you can store your salvaged programs (one Ive used is System Rescue CD, has tools built in. - note rescue is technical if you aren’t familiar with the commands through the terminal and Mac file system best to have someone who knows what they are doing do this...) Once you got the bootable image you restart your computer with the option key to get the boot selector to select the usb image and boot. (if the mac was OS 10.6.4+ should boot a Linux USB image fine; prior to that Macs didn't have the firmware update for that supports other bootloaders) Now for recovering your applications, get the needed stuff in applications folder, and related preference and extension files in your user/library and system/library and also preferences for both folders - dig around a little there may be multiple places for stuff to have been installed. (put the files in the same relative places on your other system will usually do the trick, if you get an error, it will probably tell you what you missed.) Well this is incomplete - but something to get you started - if you can read the files off your crashed drive you have a good chance of getting most of your stuff off it. Good Luck.