For those of you doing this for a living, do you like doing this? Does it leave you happy, or frustrated? Emotionally, what's the worst part of it?

It depends on the day. Some days complicated problems are resolved easily leaving you feeling like the hddguru you knew you were while other times seemingly simple problems become a nightmare leaving you questioning why you are even in the business. MHO anyway.

This business has lot of funs and joys. But yes, it's also frustating when you deal with customer who is "rushy". They think this job is easy and they're paying too much for this kind of work.

Well.. ....too late. I'm already in this business too long (since 1993) and I can not stop now. Too many effort has been invested.

I think the main problems from clients are because they lack any knowledge of the many many different problems and the skills needed to repair them. Many of my customers are under the impression that we can do everything easily and quickly, and of course there are times when we can not and this is very very frustrating!

But its a pretty unique industry where most knowledge is self learned, you cant get taught how to do data recovery, you have to discover it

yes thats so true .