Unless you invest some cash I doubt you'll get far. If I was looking at this MBP I would boot from an external drive containing an OS at least equal to the OS it shipped with and check to see if the hard drive could be seen in disk utility. The drive should be big enough to hold the OS, diagnostics and whatever data is on the drive. If yes, I would run disk warrior on the hard drive. If disk warrior successfully rebuilt the directory, great, problem likely fixed. If it starts registering disk malfunctions, let the diagnostics run until they finish, could be hours or days. You may get the option to recover data from a disk preview. If unsuccessful run data rescue. If this recovers your data, great. Both disk warrior and data rescue are commercial applications. If data rescue doesn't recover the data and the data has sufficient value, source a clean room data recovery company, this is expensive. If the hard drive isn't seen by disk utility, remove it, mount it in a caddy or usb case, see if a mac can see it. No Mac, you have a problem. If you get access to a Mac and the Mac doesn't see it, revert back to a potential clean room recovery. If the Mac does see the drive and it checks out ok, you likely have a cable problem, source, replace and problem solved. There's no easy way to recover data. The easy part is replacing a failed hard drive and reinstalling the OS.