CJ,
I am not familiar with SATA drives, not yet having had the pleasure of playing with them, but I would be extremely cautious of installing ANYTHING onto a disk that you know contains data, but where an OS sees it as unreadable.
If the FAT is corrupt, for example, there is nothing to tell the OS where existing data is located, and it will almost certainly be totally or partially overwritten.
I would only install an OS where I had already made a block-by-block copy (clone) of the source disk, and even then I would do the install on the clone, not the original.
Depending on how valuable your data is, you might consider going to a specialist data recovery outfit (google is your best bet). Although your assessment of the value of the data may change when you see the cost of recovery...
Good luck
SD