Hey - if you know anything about computers, and have another currently functioning computer on-hand, its POSSIBLE that you can recover the data yourself. Remove the hard drive from your pc and slave it to a working pc. its a slim shot but it might work, and slaving isn't complicated. if it works you'll be able to access the hard drive and remove the files there to another drive, (or better, burn them to cd so they aren't damaged/lost again). I speak from personal experience here when a few years ago my pc was hit by lightening and i had to do the same thing. it destroyed the file system of the drive, not to mention the mother board and processor, but the files themselves were still on the hard drive - a good 90% or more). Anyway, just thought i'd suggest it. its worth a shot. what's to lose?