Can my macbook HDD be used in a windows desktop?
Have you tried to boot to the recovery partition ..Boot with Cmd-R held down, and use disk utility to check/repair the filesystem

In the windows PC the disk should spin up but Windows will not be able to recognise the HFS+ filesystem on it, and will offer to format it for you. Don't let it!
Paragon Software produce a tool HFS+ for Windows which will allow it to mount the disk. 

This will probably fail in strange and interesting ways if it is in fact corrupted. Another option might be some of the Mac Disk recovery programs e.g. Diskwarrior or TechToolPro