When I lost my HD I tried that but my tech guy said the old one was literally cooked. It was a 1 in a million thing and I'm just happy a few saves is all I lost. If I had pictures of Bigfoot or something on there I'd be pissed.

That's why I was so hesitant to make a post in here; afraid I'd be bitching about a stupid save while the OP just lost the doctorate he'd been working on for the past six months. :P

I was real depressed when my computer wouldn't start up, the one I just beat both Witcher games on...still haven't touched the thing.

When I had the slightest inkling my laptop was going to go, I backed the hell out of everything. Paranoia beats hardware failures all the time. :p

There's no sicker of a feeling in your stomach than when a hard drive fails...

I was semi-lucky here recently. My desktop was hanging a lot and I wasn't sure what was causing it. After struggling with it for a few days, on a reboot suddenly windows could no longer find the registry anymore. I immediately decided that it was a possible primary hard drive failure and shut the computer down. I ordered a replacement drive and a SATA hard drive enclosure for data recovery. I installed the OS from scratch (installed 7 instead of Vista, using the 7 upgrade disc that pre-ordered on the cheap) and haven't experienced any problems since. It *appears* that I was able to recover most of the data from the damaged hard drive via the external enclosure, but of course, I likely won't know if there's any corrupted files until I attempt to use them. Hopefully whatever other corrupted files there are were only system OS file, etc.

BTW, you mentioned that you "wiped" the HD. I hope you don't mean that you are continuing to use the faulty hard drive after it initially failed. That's a big no-no. Once a HD fails, you generally won't be able to trust it ever again. The likelihood of additional failures is extremely high. If I misunderstood then just ignore me, but if you are reusing the failed hard drive, do yourself a favor and buy a replacement before you put anything important on there and lose it again.

that's why you always need to have 2 hdd and you only use the first one for the OS and the second one for your data, but yeah it sucks when it happen :(

It didn't become self aware and attempt to destroy your timeline did it? I'm sorry, I had to ;)
Also, and this. I know when I've totally had a hard drive go to hell on me in the past, I was able to pull out the harddrive (physically), plug it into a computer (often an old dust collecting monster in my basement) and run enough recovery software to save the files that were corrupted in the first place. Of course, YMMV (and it's been a while since I've had to do this) but if you can pull the harddrive and know the modern programs to hunt down and restore those corrupted files it might be worth a go.

if you had used origin to play mass effect then your save will be in the cloud , i was pretty surprised when i decided to load up mass effect 2 and 3 that my years old profile were still intact

I think you have to specifically enable it in Origin. Mine is disabled but Origin sometimes forgets so it syncs. I disabled it because my DA:O saves were bigger than the cloud space.