Need help with deactivating Photoshop CS5 on dead hard drive

there's no work-around for deactivating without the same hardware.

If the hard drive died, there won't be a way for the server to see that comptuer as active for you to complete the deactivation process. Your only hope is that you didn't use up both activations and you can use the second activation on the new computer. This is assuming you can re-install as depending on your OS, you may not be able to install CS5 on the new computer.