When I went on vacation this past week my laptop decided to give me hell. It would freeze at the point when windows xp started to fade in. I choose f2 and ran a hard drive self test and it came up with 2 - 17 something. Ive been trying to restore windows with the XP sp1 disk but it freezes when it tries to load once finished. Should I just loose my 1000's of family photos and format the system and try and reinstall windows on a clean system. Bestbuy's geeksquad told me it was probably my harddrive that went out. Any input? 
