well I got windows 8 pro, it worked great for around a month and then suddenly just stopped. every time I booted up it said diagnosing problem then pc repair failed. long story short I had to wipe my hard drive and I lost everything, games, game saves, school work, music, software, photos and so on. got very angry when Microsoft support couldn't help with the initial issue. so I wondering if anybody could help incase problem occurs again. and I will be backing up my drive this this time.
Too late, you got rid of all the evidence. There was no need to lose all your data. You should have asked for help when you needed it, not after you destroyed it all.
Always good to have a separate drive (internal or external) to back up "mission critical data" such as game saves, personal photos, school work, etc. I just use an external 1TB drive for all my movies, games, saves, photos, and music and its only half full. Also some other words of advice, go back to Windows 7. I have tried W8 and its a mess. Not just the because of the GUI its other things too. Its like jumping on the bandwagon of a new MMO, you know for a fact their are going to be bugs and issues at first. I wont be upgrading to W8 anytime soon, until either the first SP is out or they change the god awful GUI and let us just click a button and have our old desktop back. I know you can already do this, but its a watered down, washed out, limited desktop and you have to use third party apps, or editing registry settings to get it back to the way it was and even then you still cant get it back to its full previous W7 state. EDIT: Also Microsoft support are about as useful as a bag a brick in a washing machine.
You could have booted from some sort of live OS, on cd/dvd or usb and probably recovered the data. You should run some sort of diagnostic software on the OS drive, it maybe failing.
Microsoft support is almost always useless....lol. When Windows7 launched, I spent hours on the phone with MS over BSOD's that occurred during installation.....without finding an actual solution.
Your HDD might have bad sectors, if this occurs again for no reason and you are very sure of that, then it will strengthen the suspicion, try using a software that scans bad sectors or other "errors", if it doesnt return anything wrong then your hdd might be ok, i say (might) because in some very rare cases some hdds can have bad sectors but still work "fine" for a while. EDIT: And like you have been suggested before, if you store sensitive data like that, like photos and school work, you should always have a backup, if youre not gonna buy a hdd, then try at least a pen or 2 with decent storage.
Windows 8 has a very handy new feature called File History which will automatically backup all your main user folders to an external hard drive just in case this happens... Did you format the drive before re-installing Windows? If not your old files will be in a folder called windows.old in C:
that file history was a saver for me.. by mistake i deleted my witcher save on my back up drive. but then I found out I had the file history running. and there it was. windows 8 keeped it for me... also create a windows 8 recovery cd. it helps alot when the pc wont bootup and gets stuck in the repair mode. At lest that way if you cant get into windows, you can use the recovery cd, and use the command prompt to copy files. it seems Im becoming a master of the windows 8 recovery. I been experimenting and breaking windows 8 for 3 months now and it still running.