Ubuntu dies shortly after booting up after NVIDIA drivers reinstallation

I am a linux beginner and I have a dualboot windows + ubuntu 24 computer. One day I had an issue that after booting up a white screen appeared saying 'Oops! An error occurred' and nothing else, immediately after the booting up splash.

after reinstalling the nvidia drivers from TTY mode the ubuntu partition came boots up again but now shortly after logging in the DE starts to fail, first programs do not open after clicking the icon, then icons disappear, then buttons don't work until everything turns black logging this text over and over again.

[ 279.990149] systemd-journald[429]: Failed to write entry to /var/log/journal/5967b5f11c38413494089ec4b69c4e4/system.journal (24 items, 626 bytes) despite vacuuming, ignoring: Input/output error (Dropped 13 similar messages)

so I tried booting up from a live USB and checking up the health of the disk where the installation is located using smartctl and it says 'busy cannot read at the moment'.

I am really worried because that partition has priceless data that isn't mine and I have no backup of it. What should I do? LLMs keep getting me in this endless loop of checking logs and telling me and and may be this or that, no concise answers of how grave the situation is.