Before you decide that your computer needs to be replaced simply because it has a crashed hard drive, consider that in 90% of all cases the cause of a crashed hard drive is simply software related. What this means is that your hard drive itself has not suffered any damage. It does not have a burned out motor or fried control board. In fact, if you do have damage to the computer itself, it is more likely that your desktop or laptop computer’s motherboard itself has overheated.
Fortunately, the very process of diagnosing a computer that fails to start up by loading its Windows operating system will also tell you whether or not you have a physically damaged hard drive or one that simply needs to have operating system files reloaded. If this is the case, you will need to use a program designed for crashed hard drive recovery. To accomplish this task and quickly put your failed computer back into the operating mode, you want to load into your computer a basic file recovery disk. There are several quality programs available on the Internet for this purpose. Once the disk loads, it should allow your computer to start up again. If it does not, then a large component of your computer is probably at fault and failed. If your computer does start up using a file recovery disc, then you may proceed with the next step of crashed hard drive recovery. That is to access your hard drive and copy from it all of your important stored files.