A few years ago, a Co-Worker of my son's had a problem with her Desktop and took it to Best Buy.  The original problem was her computer was running abnormally slow.  So, she took it in and had Best Buy take a look at it.  

Ok...she gets back home and turns her system back on and it will no longer boot into her Operating System! (She has Windows XP® Home Edition).  She calls Best Buy back and says her computer won't turn on at all now.  The  Best Buy tech tells her that it will now cost $1700 to fix her computer; but, wasn't it just running slow when she took it in?  Now it doesn't boot into windows® at all, and they want $1700?

My son agreed to take a look at it; because, she had priceless photos that she HAD NOT backed up and it looked as if they were GONE forever!

He spent several days trying to access her drive through various methods to no avail.....system was brought to our home where he and I spent several MORE days working on recovering these pictures....Normally, I can use a Live Linux CD/DVD to access a Windows® partition to access "Priceless" data...this time...it DID NOT WORK!  Linux was basically telling me the partition was "toast"...determined to fix her system...we tried other methods from "slaving" the drive into another XP® system to slaving it into a Linux system.  I did notice something odd when I was able to "see" her drives/folders...it appeared that her Documents & Settings folder had been "Ghosted" into a separate folder...WOW...who did that...we checked w/her...NOPE...that only leaves the person that she took the system to to inquire about making the system faster...that would be Best Buy & Geek Squad!  Had they done something to prevent her system from booting only to tell her $1700 to FIX IT!  Only Best Buy knows the answer to that...all I know is that it took MAJOR effort on my son/my part to actually get access to her pictures...we could access most of her data; but, her My Pictures Folder® was EMPTY...it ended up being a "Permissions" issue and we had to slave it into a system in my home which was running XP® Home and then we had to change the permissions on the folder from within the imported to system...once we did that, MAJIC....her pics re-appeared & we were able to copy them to an external Hard Drive and burn them to DVD's for her!  Needless to say, she was relieved to have her pics and extremely unhappy with Best Buy! She took us out to dinner to thank us for saving her memories!