I had the same problem with FAMILY shots. I pulled the disk out an sent it away, $850 nothing, lost.
Don't do anything.
Go out and buy a hard drive, I just picked up a 500GB SATA for $62. Buy an external enclosure for a hard drive.
Put your EXISTING hard drive in the enclosure and load up the new hard drive with the OS
Unless you totally damaged the drive, your pics will be there.
Back up your picks from the USB connected external drive, and then trash it and re load all your files back to the external
I ALWAYS have 2 drives on a computer. One is OS and programs only, the other is files. Then I back up the file drive.
File managment is consummate importance. I have files from the mid 90s all backed pu on CD. I'll probably never need them, but nice to know I have them.