You didn't get any replies to your question. Has this already been overtaken by events?
The hard disk problem would explain why nothing works on the laptop. The rest of the laptop could be fine (no reason to trash it). It sounds like your hard disk went senile. If you have not reformatted it, the contents are likely still there. If the entire disk was a single partition, it may be possible to restore it. I have seen software that will do this but I'm not up on what is currently available.
Otherwise, there are many programs that will do a low-level recovery of the disk contents (many are free). These programs go sector by sector recovering raw data from the platters, copy it to another drive, and then figure out how the pieces fit together. It is often a significant task to go through the results (could be tens of thousands of files, sometimes with limited identifying information). You may have to triage by size and other characteristics, depending on how much time you have available and how valuable the files were.
Fortunately, I have not had to recover an entire hard disk. Rather than recommend a program I have not personally tested for this purpose, let me encourage other members to share what programs they have had success with.