There's nothing in that description that sounds like a mechanically-failed hard drive; it sounds more like a corrupted filesystem. The first step is to, on another PC, perhaps using one of those USB-to-IDE gadgets, make a complete image of the raw disk. (Don't ask me or the BBS how to do this. Find someone who already knows.) Then copy that image, and you can use recovery tools on the copies, not the disk (in case a particular recovery tool does more harm than good, which isn't out of the question). If the worst comes to the worst, there are tools which can scan a raw disk image for data that looks like the header of a JPEG file, and which can recover those files as long as they're not fragmented.

If making the complete image fails, you're in it for the long haul and need to (find someone to) make an image by copying only those sectors which are still readable, and then go spelunking on that for JPEG headers. Is the partition FAT32 or NTFS?

Peter