I did think of another option you could try and that is to make an image of the disk and then try to use an image explorer to extract the information from the image. I know drive image pro lets you modifiy the images after they are created. Ghost lets you do the same with ghost explorer.
Still slaving to a machine is probably the easiest that way you just copy the files you need from one disk to the other and then you are free to re-ghost your original disk.