Screwed Hard Drive

Applecare said my hard drive is not being recognized and needs to be replaced. Even after walking me through steps many different ways, it is to be replaced by an authorized service center. My problem is getting the pictures off the hard drive. Is there any way to make the hard drive a slave to another mac? If so would I be able to download the pics onto anther mac? Please help as I do not want to lose any info. My brother seems to think he can use a case that makes an internal hardrive act as an external and possibly get the info off. He has done it in the past on windows machines, but he doesn't know how many pins the mac hard drive has. Is it similar to a pc hardrive? Or will I have to buy an adapter? Any help would be great....Thanks in advance.

Mac and PC hard drives are the same, you can use them on either device. It's just the formatting that is different, which has to do if the operating system can read/write to it. And, any drive can be reformatted to a different format by the operating system or other utility, although that also erases it. The idea of using an external casing would work, or, you just set up the drive as a slave drive the same way you would with a PC.