Was it your hard drive that crashed?
If not, then you can salvage everything by removing it from your computer and connecting it to another computer with either a hard drive enclosure or a hard drive dock (docks are cheaper and easier to use)
**speaks from personal experience after a transformer down my block exploded taking out many electrical and electronic devices belonging to me and my neighbors--in my case an old tv and my XP computer (luckily it didn't catch fire, as I could smell burning too)
In any case, my hard drive survived, so once linked to my new Win7 comp through a hard drive enclosure, I was able to recover all the data that was stored on it.
Based on your description, it doesn't sound like you had a hard drive crash, btw.