Tell me your worst hard-drive nightmares.

At this one place i used to work we had a this client that was pretty large so they had us as the main IT team dealing with any physical or software jobs, however they had a basic IT team in the head office for basic admin crap like password resets and stuff so he got called out as one of their it team who was like 55+ who did the basic admin shit supposedly used to repair pc's back in his younger days was told that their was a issue with one of the pc's and he was to call us out their 2 hours prior which he decided not to do cos 'he could fix it'. he proceeded to snap the sata port off of the 2.5 ssd. mind you this was a few years ago when ssd's were not as cheap as they are now. safe to say he got sacked

This is not so much a nightmare, but a praise for $300 data recovery (.com). A doctor in the office next to mine doesn't have an IT guy, so he asked if I could bring his computer back from the dead. It had already been to best buy unsuccessfully. I pulled his drive and sent it to them, and within a few days they were sending back an external with 95%+ of his data in tact. Best $300 I've spent in a long time, especially because i charged him for it + the drive + labor. Yay!