I have seen ants swarm and short things inside computers and electronics before. Rare (rodents and spiders are usually the culprits there) but far from unknown.
Most computer repair shops will offer such a service, mainly because it is easy and as it takes hours (99% of which is watching the percentage bar crawl up) they can charge a lot of money for it.
I tend to do it myself -- go buy what is called a caddy or a hard drive reader. If you can remove the hard drive (some particular bastards on modern stuff solder them in) then shove it into the caddy/reader, plug in the USB from the caddy to the new PC, if you can copy files from a USB drive to your PC you can probably do this. That said modern Windows might complain and you might then need to give yourself access to your old hard drive files -- takeown and iacls then being what you want in that case
https://appuals.com/takeown/
At that point it really is copy and paste.
The cost of the caddy is probably less than the cost of the service (if the caddy is more than $50 then something is very wrong), and if you are on a site like this you can learn those two commands (or at least look them up next time) so get to do the same for the next computer of yours, a friend, a family member, work or similar decides to do that for.
Similarly chuck a hard drive in the caddy and whoo extra external hard drive (probably with the added bonus of it being a nice drive rather than whatever WD had around the factory that day they can lie and say was your fault for dropping it when it fails in 8 months). Get a DVD drive and it will function as one of those when you have one of those modern magic space computers without such things (or an old computer where the drive got dusty years ago).
There are magic drive readers that might do better for dying drives than ye boring and basic caddy, these being the things that the specialist data recovery firms will have to try for you before fiddling with hardware and charging you fortunes. If by some miracle best buy have one of these then I would not trust them to operate it. For the most part unless it is do or die information then if a basic caddy (which includes using tools like photorec and recuva, possibly also trying from a different OS; I have had Windows drives work under Linux reading that Windows failed with, and Windows live boot things work where Linux has failed) does not do the trick then consider it gone. False hope that something is not gone is worse than it being gone.
If your original computer still boots then I will often instead just share the files as network shares and copy things that way, or set up a FTP server and copy things that way. If the hard drive works but the OS is dead then boot off a Linux live CD/USB and that tends to ignore any passwords or whatever you might have set up.
The most annoying part is in the modern world people usually want their browser settings to be transferred (stored bookmarks, history, passwords and what have you). You can search for chrome, firefox or whatever profile transfer though. It tends to be 1000x easier if the machine is running and you can use one of the backup and transfer programs.
http://www.oldversion.com/ has some good stuff if you need old versions to match and upgrade later, though most browsers should be able to source such a thing. Don't be afraid to use another browser's "import data from another browser" option either.
Also you now know why it is said "everybody forgets to take backups once". Also in case you were unaware rather than downloading 90 files and installing them one by one then allow me to introduce you to
https://ninite.com/
With all you have now a can of air duster means you are local computer fixing whizz.