USB port output just mere 5 volts which is insignificant to cause any major damage to your laptop cooler. First off, you should not have cut the wire without knowing what was wrong. It was mechanical fault which is why your cooler fan didn't work. You could have bought new one at around $9.99
I doubt if the usb wire caused any major damage to your laptop. If your laptop's built-in fan was already dead and was solely depending on external laptop coolers fan, most probably you let it fry itself, like CPU, motherboard and everything.. and I believe it's HP laptop. Certain HP laptops are defunct with their BGA chipset design, upon heating, it melts pretty fast rendering your laptop useless.
It takes a long route to damage your harddrive even if your motherboard is fried up,.. And, the way you described your way of doing things, I'm pretty much sure you lack a knowledge on how to retrieve data off your harddrive. Make sure if it's 2.5 inch SATA or IDE, find a USB connector on ebay, connect it and retrieve it from the working computer.