A few nights back, my Dell Dimension 8100 froze up and ignored a SHUTDOWN order.  Toggling the ON/OFF switch had no effect, so I physically pulled the plug.  When powering back up, the message INVALID SYSYTEM DISK was displayed over and over.

Using a modified Norton Ghost Disaster Recovery Boot Disk set prompted a message that it was impossible to regenerate the necessary Virtual Partition to do a Ghost 2003 Restore.  Reaching deep in my toolkit, I pulled out my trusty Partition Magic 8.0 bootable diskette set which alarmingly informed me in its DOS-based mode that my 160GB Maxtor DiamondMax was suffering from all sorts of irrecoverable maladies.

At wit's end, I inserted my XP Home Edition CD and fired up the Recovery Console where I used the DISKPART command to uncover the fact that I had partitions that were corrupted and overlapping.  I promptly used the command to eliminate of existing partitions before I exited the Console mode.

Upon emerging, I booted back into the Partition Magic DOS-mode where I performed a of the single partition extant.  I then rebounded with a command for PM to format the entire 160GB HDD as a single primary active NTFS partition as preparation for a Ghost 2003 'image-to-disk' Restore.

The most recent Ghost image (Fast compression, at that) of my 8100 resided on a 60GB Maxtor mounted in a Bytecc ME-320U2 external enclosure kit which can only operate in USB 2.0 with the magic of NightOwl's Panasonic Universal USB Driver routine.  Well, to make a long story shorter, I popped in the modified Disaster Recovery Disk set and did a flawless Ghost Restore of my primary NTFS partition and my extended partition containing three NTFS logical drives and a single FAT32 drive.

So far, my Maxtor 160GB has passed all diagnostics with flying colors and continues to function flawlessly so far through a couple of busy days now.  I guess all that I have left to say is:

 

Wow. Impressive restore. Reminds me of the time I had to wipe the drive before I could restore the image.

http://www.digitalissues.co.uk/html/os/misc/ibm-wipe-zap.html

Very impressive recovery!
I think however that the wound was self inflicted by the hard power down with electric spike corrupting the data in very vulnerable spot (partition table or so).  Thus you should change the title to "revive corrupted HDD".
When my 8100 acts up like that (happens from time to time) I press the off button for longer time (sometimes several seconds) to force to  power down (less brute). 
I used my Ghost for real recovery once since installing a month ago when bad installation of MS MidtownMadness permamently changed windows resolution to invalid settings on my boy's computer.  Worked like a charm.