recover data from root.disk

I had Ubuntu v8.04 installed on my Vista laptop.
Then my laptop refused to start up at all, I didn't even get the first bios screen, let alone the os selection menu.
I removed the hard disks and backed them up onto another PC and sent off laptop which eventually returned fixed, but I had removed all sensitive data including the ubuntu folder.
I tried copying the ubuntu folder back, but the boot failed with a failure to find a disk by UUID, so I installed the latest ubuntu (v8.10) instead.
At last the question - can I 'mount' my old root.disk to get at the documents etc that are in there somewhere?