I'm going to add my voice to the Geek Squad being worse than useless. I lost valuable family photos, (Not wedding, those are always backed up) and the Geek said they were unrecoverable. I got rid of the HD, only to find out later I most probably could have recovered the images.
A few years ago I accidentally formatted a drive that had a bunch of important data on it (oops, grabbed the wrong drive! Stupid, stupid, stupid). I used Phoenix NTFS to recover everything. It's another program that can mount and explore HDs with problems...even a full format because someone is dumb. Thankfully because of this experience, I'm now much smarter and that sort of thing won't happen again, thanks to my increased intelligence . Well, they're more clearly labeled anyway, even if I'm still a big dummy...
If you're not a computer geek, your best bet is probably having someone else do it though...
. Well, they're more clearly labeled anyway, even if I'm still a big dummy...