This post covers some straight forward approaches to hard drive recovery after a disk crash has occurred. Each approach has the potential to work on system/software crashes. However, if component damage has occurred to the PC then you are best going with data recovery experts for a mechanical recovery.
If the OS is simply not working then you could consider turning the internal hard drive into external storage to access the data. Most PC shops stock external cases for hard drives. You simply remove the old disk, insert it into the protective casing and plug it (USB connection) into another PC to copy over the data.
If you don’t like opening up computers then you could consider booting the PC from a Linux CD then copy the hard drive contents. For this type of hard drive recovery all you need to do is burn to CD a copy of Linux Live CD (available online) and insert it in the crashed computer. Reboot the PC and go to the BIOS settings (hit F2 as Windows starts). Alter the boot sequence putting ‘CD’ as the first option. When you now boot the computer the Linux OS will start and you view the hard disk contents (and copy them to external HDD).
Finally, you could resort to data recovery service to fix PC errors that caused the crash or simply recover the disks contents. Component damaged PCs can require disk harnesses/readers to access data which can prove expensive. They will also use data recovery software (e.g. freeware like PhotoRec or Recuva which you can also try) to access files when the drive is healthy.
Hard drive recovery is not particularly hard to do but the results can be patchy (varying amounts of found files). For this reason, you should depend more upon keeping backup copies of data to safeguard your documents rather than risk lost files.
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