Yikes!

I am freaking out today! Our backup hard drive failed a few weeks ago abruptly. We didn't worry about it much because we only store our home movies on that drive and they are all archived to CD. It did scare me a bit though and I tried to archive our recent pictures, but the folders were too big to put on one CD. Bottom line -- I never got them archived. Fast forward to today and our primary hard drive fails. I've tried everything I can think of (which wasn't much), so I'm at a dead end. I e-mailed a friend tonight to see if they have any suggestions. We really don't want to be spending a lot of money on computers right now, but my main concern is my pictures!! I am praying that they can be recovered!!