Just be careful, 20 years experience working on computers is completely irrelevant if your hard disk has sustauned any physical or media damage. This is a whole new ball game

You should at least find a reputable local shop. Geek Squad is absolutely horrible.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

I thought Geek Squad was great. I didn't know how to change the background wallpaper, or how to get to AOL.com, so they formatted my drive, reinstalled Windows 9.0, and gave me the name of a very nice data recovery company so I could get my data back. And their technicians are so polite! I just think it's so cute seeing a teen in a tie. And with those fancy cars they drive, they must be good. Very professional. Not like the guy around the corner who looks like he's been in business 30 years...

I will have to bear this recommendation in mind

What my uncle has me doing is taking and putting in the replacement HD that Western Digital sent me and putting it in place of the one we think is bad, then trying to load the OS onto the new one. This will atleast let me know that it's either the HD or the OS and if that doesn't fix it then he's gonna send his PC guy over to try and help me.

Sometimes, I'm a bit too subtle. So somebody doesn't mistake my intentions:

Geek Squad geeks are a bunch of format monkeys trained only in padding the bill.

And nobody caught the Windows 9.0 reference?

How do you plan on doing this?

At the end of the day, if your data is important to you AT ALL, you need to stop and let someone who knows what they're doing handle it.

No, you probably don't need or want pro data recovery for $1500, but PLEASE take your computer to a local shop where they know what they're doing. Prices in my area would run around $80-$150 to solve your problem.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Yeah, that was good.

In my area it's more like "Geek Squad said they could fix my computer but they had to send it to the regional depot and I didn't get it back for 5 weeks and they also lost my hard drive and I had to call and complain four times before someone found it and shipped it to me" (actually happened)

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

To be honest, the data doesn't bother me all that much, because I wanted to go from Vista 32 to Vista 64. It's only about 2-3 months worth of data anyways. I got it up and running again with the new harddrive. I'm going to attempt to plug the old harddrive in to my external enclosure to try and recover a little bit of the data. If I can, cool. If not, oh well. The only thing that hasn't worked so far is my World of Warcraft, however I think they'll send me a new key after the email I sent them. Thanks for everyones help. The only other question I have would be how to go about making a ghost copy onto my backup harddrive?

If the drive has bad sectors, Ghost will fail.

You would need to use a tool that can tolerate bad sectors. I am sure you are capable of finding that on your own with Google's help.

Weird, it worked for all 4-5 hours last night while loading a bunch of the cd's I have, then for an hour or so this morning before starting the same crap again. I know it's not overheating because I have a ton of fans in there and I purposely pulled the side off last night after about 3 hours or so to see if it was running hot and it was still really cool in there. If it's not the hard drive, or the OS, what could it be? Power supply? Motherboard?

Time to take it to a repair shop. This is not a "fix your computer" forum.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.