Hard Drive Got Corrupted

I was checking my Old desktop computer last week when something went wrong. All I remember was a long strange beep sound and then computer suddenly shut down. Unfortunately, i was in the middle of downloading a movie online. Actually few days before that incident, I heard a strong popping sound inside my CPU tower but because I didn't experience any issue after that, I decided to ignore it and continue to use this computer as if nothing happened. So after the computer shut down, I tried to reboot my PC but I got stocked with a black screen with an error stating that my hard drive is corrupted. I tried to restart my computer over and over again but I'm still getting the same error message which is very irritating. So I left it unopened for one day, hoping that computer will fix itself (LOL) but I still encounter the same issue after turning my PC on. I ended up calling a technician to fix this problem. I felt so bad when he told me that the only way to fix this issue is to reformat my PC which means i will be LOSING all my files saved from that computer. Unfortunately, I saved all my recent photos in my hard drive including some of our Art projects. I'm afraid, we can't make those projects again but then again, I have no choice but to agree with the technician for the sake of main computer work again. If i only have that picture recovery software installed in my PC, I'm sure I have no reasons to worry about loosing my files. However, it's too late for me to think about that since my Hard drive got corrupted already and all my files are being removed completely from the hard drive.
This is a lesson I have learned and to prevent this from happening again, I might consider now downloading a Photo Recovery software to recover pictures from hard drive in case it got corrupted again or in case i accidentally deleted my photos. If you're interested, you can http://hetmanrecovery.com and see how you can download the software online.