Vista not Recognizing Hard Drive at bootup

Hello,
The pre-story goes like this. I was messing around with the boot sector of my hard drive. My computer decides to turn off.... Now when I try to load Vista onto my computer, it doesn't work. The Problem definitely is that the computer isn't recognizing the hard drive. So, with that said I cannot get to the password screen on Vista. I have done Windows Repair, but none of those options that are available, as that hard drive is required. I have tried repairing the bootup also with Vista Recovery CD sent from the manufacturer of my computer. No success. I have tried putting in a XP disc to check on the problem. It didnt work. Than I took off the hard drive from the computer and plugged it in with another computer. I have already tried connecting it with a desktop by disconnecting the port to the CD Drive and connecting it to the hard drive. With that said, " My computers" did not detect the hard drive, but I went ahead t disk management and I came up my hard drive. Every partition (Recovery, Etc.) is healthy, but the primary partition isn't. How do I go about exporting the all the partitions to another hard drive? And when I do export the hard drives, should I just re-format the with the data safely being on another hard drive. If all else fails, I can just re-format the hard drive ( with the data, if it doesnt export) so that I can completely erase everything and make it brand new. I really don't want to as I know I have data worth $4,000. And if re-formating the data doesnt work, can I just buy a new hard drive and copy the partition onto the the new hard drive to have the same data working? I really dont want to have a to buy a new hard drive

TESTDISK at https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

"TestDisk can

* Fix partition table, recover deleted partition
* Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup
* Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector
* Fix FAT tables
* Rebuild NTFS boot sector
* Recover NTFS boot sector from its backup
* Fix MFT using MFT mirror
* Locate ext2/ext3 Backup SuperBlock
* Undelete files from FAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystem
* Copy files from deleted FAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3 partitions. "

Does this sound like the way to resolve whatever problem I am facing?
Anyway to get this to work?