Sometimes it's my week to have drive problems; sometimes it's your week. One of you had a cranky startup drive, but because your Mac wouldn't boot, you couldn't run Disk Utility to perform the necessary repairs. Fortunately, this Catch 22 had a happy ending; the drive was repaired using the simple techniques outlined in:
Courtesy of Coyote Moon, Inc.
How Can I Repair My Hard Drive If My Mac Won't Start?
One of you had a "problem" most of us would love to have: a spare hard drive, after upgrading the drive in a MacBook Pro.
Repurposing hard drives happens to be one of my favorite DIY projects; in this case, it involved putting an internal drive into an external case and designating it for extra storage. But if you're going to do it right, you need to do more than just pop the drive into an enclosure and plug it in. You should test the drive first, to ensure that it's healthy enough to re-use and entrust with your data.
Check this guide for information on testing drives, as well as links to information on repurposing drives: