Harddisk unmounted (Help)

Hello. This is my first post I will be very grateful if someone can help me with this.

Well, the situation is this: My significant other (sigh) being a person who takes rushed actions without thinking broke her Macbook Air (running Lion) in which she had all our family photos (years) without backup (not really sure what she did but it seems she pushed the turn on/off button while having the iPhotos open -or at least that is what she says)

The mac didn't boot (just freezed at the apple logo)

So after talking with Apple Service, and trying without success safe mode boot, what I did was buying a new external 500GB disk and using internet to do a reinstall on there. So now -provided I have the disk connected- have a brand new Lion running Macbook Air.

The objective was to access the original harddisk of the mac and try to copy the files as much as I can.

The thing is that the Mac does not recognize the harddisk. (it does not appear in finder and when I use disk utility I can see it is there but it is greyed and it reads ""Mount Point: Not mounted, Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)"

Before I tried to verify and restored the disk but it said it could not be repaired with messages such as
Invalid B-tree node size
Volume check failed.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed."

So, could anyone give me some ray of hope of how can I access at least some parts of her harddisk so as to recover our precious mementos??

Thanks a lot for any help