My hard drive died, how can I get my pictures back from iPad onto a new library on the hard drive?

Hi there,

I have a Mac Book, and as it's a little older, and was getting full, I moved my iPhoto library onto an external hard drive. This external hard drive was always plugged in, and iPhoto used it as it's store so to speak.

However, the hard drive has died which means I now have no access to any of my photo's.

As I sync both my iPad and iPhone to iphoto in it entirity, at the minute I have ALL my photos on both my iPad and my iPhone.

How can I recover the photo's onto my mac or new hard drive from the ipad or iphone? I don't dare plug either in at the minute as I don't want the Sync to remove the photos.

HELP! Please!

James