Hard drive not recognised. Haven't backed up my work recently. Don't want to lose everything

I'm having a bit of disaster. I finished university for the term today, and typically my laptop decided immediately after my last class to die.
When I turn it on I get a picture of a flashing folder with a question mark.
I put it into recovery mode, intending to try and repair the disk. But it says the only disk in Disk Utilities is the Mac OS X base disk, or something like that. I DO have a time machine backup that I'm pretty sure I ran since installing Mountain Lion. Unfortunately I don't think I've backed up using Time Machine in the last 8 weeks, so it won't have any of my work from this term of university. Obviously losing this work would be a bit disastrous for my life and sanity.
Does anyone have any advice as to what to do? I have a genius bar appointment booked bu not until Thursday and if it's something I could fix myself I'd be keen to do that (although obviously I'm not keen for taking apart my laptop for fear of destroying it even further, and also because I think my laptop is still under warranty. I bought it 13 months ago in the education store, and I thought I read somewhere that it came with a 3 year hardware warranty - can anyone confirm this?)
Any advice would be most gratefully received!

General File Recovery
If you stop using the drive it's possible to recover deleted files that have not been overwritten by using recovery software such as Data Rescue II, File Salvage or TechTool Pro.  Each of the preceding come on bootable CDs to enable usage without risk of writing more data to the hard drive.  Two free alternatives are Disk Drill and TestDisk.  Look for them and demos at MacUpdate or CNET Downloads.
The longer the hard drive remains in use and data are written to it, the greater the risk your deleted files will be overwritten.
Also visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on Data Recovery.

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