Depending on what exactly went wrong with the HDD, as long as you can boot from a different drive with the 'dead' one hooked up you may still be able to access those files. I had something similar happen to me, though it was months of work that I needed to reclaim from the busted drive.

If you can't explore the broken drive simply by bootting from a functional drive instead, there are some programs that could help such as Recuva (I have not personally used that program -- the instance I was talking about was several years ago and I've forgotten what I used then, though it was a paid program and this is free).