Is there any way to recover the data on my laptop?

Buy an external 2.5" hard disk enclosure. Take out your laptop hard disk, put it inside, and see if you can read anything off it on another PC.

If it reads fine, then you must have a catastrophic failure on your laptop's other hardware, like motherboard, RAM, whatever.

If it doesn't read fine then there's your problem.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Having a direct line, without going through an enclosure, sounds really awesome, Shade. Now screwing in hard disks into enclosures is a thing of the past. It sounds like something I'd like to get.

Though I got a couple of questions:

1. I assume that 2.5" drives are powered through USB. How about 3.5" drives? Do you plug it in as normal?

2. Do you have any recommended brands? Taking a (very) quick look through Newegg, the cheapest I can find is around $20. It IS cheaper than most 3.5" enclosures, but not 2.5".

There's nowhere I can't reach.