Damn, sorry to hear of your loss.
Not a total loss though, it's still in your head & you still have the hardware, and I'm sure you learned alot!
HDD failures happen often. One of mine is starting to go, I can hear it click (the head driver fails as if it were shutting off) once in a rare moon. Currently, I use an 8GB USB stick to back up whenever I make progress. No moving parts like HDDs, so they're less susceptible to failure. Then also to be more secure, burn your projects to CD/DVD. Even more secure than that?: make RAR's, then make PAR's (parity error correction). CD/DVD's are not as reliable as one would like to think!
I wouldn't be so discouraged about graphics, especially since you know how to use FPGA's. Look at fpga4fun for more insight. An FPGA is used as the controller for an LCD display 480x320 no colors, and holds all of the font data for characters as well.
http://www.fpga4fun.com/GraphicLCDpanel.html
Never quit!