Another CompUSA said that they would have to REMOVE the hard drive completely from the laptop (for $139) to try to salvage the data and that they THOUGHT they COULD retrieve my data.
this is indeed the wisest course of action. they will install it as a secondary drive on a larger system with data recovery tools and recover your data files. sorry, your drive is very likely toast for running an os on... you can reformat it and try to reinstall, but all data will be lost. and you very likely have a few bad sectors... as the programs that attack hard drives usually try and burn a bad spot into the boot sector... first.
this is indeed the wisest course of action. No, the wisest course of action is to look through the Microsoft Knowledge base before coming to a political forum like FR. Your solution, and I don't mean this in a disparaging way, is the last action I would take.
RW9 <- been working on PC hardware since 1984, Novell Certified on 3.1, DOS/Windows expert, OEM machines - no way - built them all from scratch, Sun Solaris 2.x certified, Unisys MCP-CANDE-Cobol-A-Series Hardware-WFL...