Actually, if it's just the board, it's not all that expensive. Certainly worth the cost if you have valuable data in there. If they have to actually open the drive up, that's where we start talking serious cash.

By the way, my wife's laptop is perfectly fine. It turns out to simply be a major hardware flaw, or a flaw in her IT department at the very least. I opened up the cover over the hard disk, and found that the drive had simply slipped completely off its contacts. Either some IT person forgot to screw it down, or there just isn't anything that screws it down, which means it's free to work its way loose every time the laptop is put in its bag trackpad side down. Regardless, she's happy she didn't lose 7 pages of extensive meeting notes for an all-day meeting in the middle of nowhere