Bummer mate, sorry about your loss. I had a similar incident a few weeks ago, except in my case i knew my hard drive wasn't the problem. They kept telling me to format first before they'd sent a repairman. I kept refusing to do that, because there's too much valuable stuff on my harddrive, which in some cases (mods, music, movies) could be lost forever. They asked me why i didn't have a back up then. I have a 80 Gig harddrive, with almost 70 Gig of data on it. If you're gonna have to make a back up of that, you'll need a second harddrive. I asked if he bought a second car just in case his first one breaks down ?