No backups when external drives and online storage are so cheap? YDI.

Should have backed up your stuff dude!

That's why you always keep an external back up. If it wasn't your friend, it could've been a virus or a hard drive failure considering how old the machine is.

Qualified tech or not, you bak up anything important. If you sent this to Best buy, Staples or only other repair house and reinstalling your OS was the way to fix it. You still would have lost all the pictures. I'm guessing with 200gb of photos in a portfolio you are likely a pro photographer? You should know you need a back up of your photographs. YDI

Ever heard of back up files? 5 years of photography and you never saved the pictures to a second source? Should've known better than to not have a spare.

Try photorec it's free and even with a wiped hard drive it'll still recover your photos

its never truely wiped from the hard drive. you just need ro know how to restore it all

Hold on, wait. You have two TB of photos, accrued over five years. That's fine. It means that you take a metric ****-ton of photos, but fine. What I don't understand is how is it that your only copy of those photos is on one hard drive, especially one that is tied like this to your computer? Even if you were to have such a monstrous hard drive, it's ridiculous to assume that the only thing on your entire computer is photos. If it was an external hard drive, then how in the **** did your friend think that wiping it would help? YDI for condensing everything, or for lying about it, or for letting such an obviously moronic person work on your computer to save a few bucks.

2...terabytes? That's a lot of ******* pictures.

First, one question, why would you put all your work on the same partition as your operating system? Use a recovery program to try to salvage your work. Back up what you salvage to an external drive, then reformat, create two separate partitions use one partition for your OS, one for your work.