Blather, rinse, repeat

Is the hard drive physically damaged, or is the operating system screwed? If it's not PHYSICALLY damaged, you could download a file recovery software to at least try and save your story. Those programs are kind of "last resort" attempts, but I have used them to success in the past.

Basically you hook it up as a slave to a working computer, and run the program on the working computer. It "reads" the damaged hard drive and pulls what files it can off. Let me know if that sounds like something you might need to do, ok?