Most hard drive "crashes" aren't actually crashes but is corruption of boot files. Have you tried just hooking the drive up as a "slave" drive and seeing if you can navigate to files? You may simply be able to see them and copy them to a different drive (like the external drive you should have been backing up to ).

If the drive is truly crashed with an internal hardware issue, there are some crazy things that MAY be able to save you. One is throwing the drive into the freezer for a couple of hours and then putting it back in the computer. Sounds like BS but it has saved more than one hard drive.

I wish you luck. It sucks losing files.