How important is that data?
Do you have a computer repair shop in your town?
If you do, then take your computer and your external hard drive in to them. Tell them that you want all of the data from your computer's hard drives to be transfered to the external drive.
They should be able to do this in less than an hour.
I'm sure it will be considerably less than $1800.
Then take you computer home and restore your computer back to factory settings.
Plug your external hard drive back in and start loading your stuff back on there.
Hope you get it sorted out.
Good luck!
