You never thought it would happen to you. You bought the latest and greatest rig with the newest, fastest, and most reliable hard drive on the market, so you didn't think you needed to backup your files. You never thought that your system would crash, and you didn't make a disaster recovery plan.

You've even been told before that a hard drive isn't a safe place to store your data. Now it's too late, and your valuable data has apparently disappeared. You need to recover your data as soon as possible. There are some things that you should do immediately.

First you need to determine if your data corruption is due to software or if it's a physical issue. This is always the first thing you should do in any data recovery crisis.

The following steps will help you recover your data from a software failure. A physical, or hardware failure, generally requires your media to be sent to a professional data recovery service.

• Once you determine that your problem is due to software, do not allow any more data to be written to the hard drive. If anything changes on the hard drive, your existing data can be overwritten, and it may become impossible to recover.
• Determine if the partition is damaged. The partition table gives the operating system different ways of looking at the space on the drive, and allows you to section it up. If a partition is destroyed, everything from that partition will seem to be missing. Your data may still be there, but you have no way of being able to see it. Most data recovery programs can see this data, however.

Transfer the drive to another computer, either using it internally or putting it into an external housing and connecting it via USB or firewire. An external enclosure is usually the safest way, as this will protect the new computer from any hardware issues the drive may be having. This will both prevent the drive from being written to and it may possibly let you get your information from the disk simply by windows explorer. This is especially true if your system has crashed because you have damaged operating systems files, or if the hard drive controller in the first pc has failed. This will eliminate any possibility that the original pc has other issues which caused your data loss.

There are many things that can complicate your data recovery issues, so if you are ever in doubt, consider using a professional data recovery service. Recovery companies have up to an 80% success rate even if the hard drive has mechanically failed. As I said before, if you are in any doubt about your abilities to recover the data yourself, use a professional service.