You can get a USB-SATA adapter and remove the drive from your laptop and hook it up to a different computer. WD, Seagate, etc has disk tool software to attempt to fix their brand of drive so you can try that if the drive does not open correctly when plugged into the other computer.
If that does not work then you just out of luck. If the data was that important then you should not have trusted it to a single point of failure (your hard drive). Anything important should be backed up. For files and small picture/music libraries there are countless online storage solutions like dropbox, google drive, etc, etc; there is no excuse for not having data backed up somewhere.
Everyone learns some lessons the hard way in their youth, just learn from it.