Hard Drive Woes

This may seem like a relatively minor issue to the more tech literate among you, but this is my "head-scratcher". Since having moved into this apartment, (divorce was finalized last month...) I've suffered three hard drive failures on two separate laptops. One was my older reliable Toshiba - Windows 7. That was the first time. I woke up one day and the screen simply read "No operating system found". I had a 60% completed CCG deck I'd been working on stored on there. So, I opted to just pull the hard drive, and since the warranty was expired and they wouldn't help me, I got Toshiba to send me a set of start-up discs for $40.00 . In the meantime, I went to Best Buy and bought a brand new HP with Windows 8, plunking down a couple hundred I could ill-afford. (thus going without groceries for a few weeks) I didn't personally pull out the hard drive on the Toshiba, (being the techno-boob I am) I left that to some guy I found in the local Yellow Pages who charged me approximately $125.00. So, I'd written off the CCG deck I'd been working on, to take up a new CCG deck based on a favorite horror-movie franchise. I had one computer to work on, and one to watch the movies for inspiration while I worked; which meant down-loading fonts, saving stills, screen-saving, cut and pasting quotes, finding new color-schmemes, backgrounds, icons and figuring out rules and play-strategies. I'll probably never make any money, but it's fun to work on. Then, one day, I wake up and discovered that both computers have no back-up, and "no OS found". I went to Best Buy and bought a new hard drive for the Toshiba; HP took care of the theirs cause it was still under warranty. But I've lost money on this, and I'm stuck with two hard drives I've tried to re-boot using the start-up discs for the Toshiba using the "re-configure without losing user data" option, but to no avail. Did I lose all the data on those hard drives? Can it ever be retrieved? Is it gonna' cost me more?!

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