I'm sure you've remembered hearing some frantic clucking noises from your hard disk just before your entire PC stopped working. The noise is a good indication that the disk is on its way out - being less reliable in saving data, losing files and occasionally losing all of your work.
Panic!
The good thing is that people can recover data from storage material. I am one of those people!
I can recover data from magnetic and charged storage only. No CD's I'm afraid. This means:
The first thing is not to panic.
For a hard disk, switch off the PC, unplug it and call me on the phone, or send me an email (through another PC ~ I like the paradox here).
For removable material, remove it from the drive (if you can) and contact me.
I always make a backup of the disk to make sure that the state of the disk when I receive it can be rewritten to the disk or a new disk.
The disk is then scanned for files and patterns to recreate a temporary FAT table of contents. The table can then retrieve data from the disk and any files that are made up. The structure of directories is always maintained.
The data can then be recovered on to the same disk, written to a new disk or specific documents can be archived on CD.
It is possible that the data may not be recoverable.
In these cases, the physical damage (such as fires past the Curie point, or badly dropping a drive) to the drive is irreversible, too costly to recover or simply not enough data exists to recover the files.
Sadly, there is nothing left to do if this is the case.