My hard drive has died, what about my data?

In most cases, this is not a good thing. Sometimes a drive won't start due to software corruption, or a bad boot sector. In some cases we are able to run utility software over the drive to see if the data is still on the drive, and if so, we may be able to recover some of the data. This can be a time consuming process.

A drive will always fail at the most inconvenient time, but there is no excuse for you to not have your data backed up, and a regular backup at that. If the data is of such a sensitive or important nature, you can send the drive to a place called Computer Forensics as they specialise in data recovery. However, their service is not cheap, but could be a last resort.