Well, I tried a little experiment. I plugged the old hd back into my system and tried to run SH 3 from my previous install. And Lo!! It works!! YAY!!! I can play now, I can play now!! and it's already got all the mods I like installed, etc ...
I'm rather amazed that it works, and I expect I'll find some bugs running it this way, but at least I can play it again.
Stupid DVD drive!! grrrr.
Not willing to do a bios update to the drive until I've got another drive to replace this one with if the bios update goes south.