Hard drive recovery
Target - Hard disk drive data recovery
If you have found yourself in an invidious situation, described in the Article Computer repair, data recovery, being an advanced or just inquisitive user, you may try to recover hard disk drive data on your own. Turn on a computer, and, depending on the model of your computer, press F2, F12 or Delete and you will get into the BIOS environment where you may check the following BIOS settings:- Whether the hard disk drive can be detected, i.e. traced by the system;
- Whether the sequence of "Boot devices" is set correctly.
If the system fails to detect the hard disk drive
, you must probably acknowledge that hard disk drive of the computer is broken. Depending on the importance of your hard drive disk data and the amount of money you are going to spend for hard drive disk data recovery, you will have to apply to the company specializing in the professional recovery of hard drive data. Never try to take out and hit or freeze a hard disk drive, as recommended in some websites of doubtful reputation. You may loose data forever. Nevertheless, if the system "finds" a hard disk drive and boot settings are correct, we leave BIOS. Let's make a presumption that you use the operating system Windows XP. There are rumors in the internet that Windows Vista was acknowledged as not meeting the expectations of users and people already talk about the pre-release version of Windows 7. Well, we will see.
Windows Advanced Options
Restart the computer and press F8. You will see the menu window "Windows Advanced Options", one of the items of which is "Last Known Good Configuration". With the help of up and down arrows, select the above menu item and press ENTER. If the system is booting, it means that you are lucky this time and your hard disk drive data and files are not damaged, nevertheless the backups should be made and next time you must be more careful.
If the system is not responding once again - restart a computer and again press F8. This time we will use the item "Safe Mode". With a bit of luck, you will see a black window with strangely large icons, but you will be able to review your data and make a backup to USB flashcard, USB hard disk drive or other data storage device. Do not miss the opportunity to take the chance! It is likely that after using "System restore" ( Click Start, click Run, type %SystemRoot%\System32\Restore\Rstrui.exe, and then click OK ) next time a computer will start without any problems. If not, a computer specialist will help you to solve the problem that is not so serious. The most important thing is that you will already have the copy of necessary data.
Windows XP installation CD/DVD
If "Safe Mode" also does not help, you can try to use Windows Xp installation CD/DVD. Windows Xp installation CD is necessary. If you do not have it, pass over to the following variants given below.After setting in the BIOS environment that the system would boot firstly from CD/DVD, ("First boot device"), insert Windows XP CD.
Select R ("recovery console") from the selection box. If requested, select the number of the necessary system, usually 1, from the list of the detected operating systems, and press ENTER. If requested, enter the administrator's password and press ENTER once again. It is usually enough to enter the command chkdsk /p in the command line and the system, 
after checking the hard disk drive, corrects the problems detected. If the above is not enough or you do not know much about what you are doing, it is not recommended to use other console commands "FixBoot", "FixMBR" or try to restore the registry from "C:\WINDOWS\repair" - as it may cause unexpected consequences. 
Perhaps it would be more easier to try to install Windows XP over the existing system, attempting to correct (by selecting "repair") this system or maybe even to reinstall it anew without formatting the disk partition or by selecting other logical partition of the hard disk drive, e.g. D, before that the copies of important data must be made by applying variants described above. If after the command chkdsk/ p the system shows a message that the access to the hard disk drive is denied or it is impossible to check the data, the variants described in the article "Windows files from Linux CD" must also be used.