If you’ve been wondering how to recover data from hard drive storage in cases where the drive itself does not allow the laptop or desktop computer to boot and start up, this article will perhaps point you in the right direction. Your choices are to dismantle your computer and remove from it the hard drive so that it can be connected using cables to the motherboard of a second working computer which will then scan the drive, or to download onto a friend or associates computer a simple file recovery tool that when installed into your personal computer by means of its CD/DVD drive allows you to open a failed hard drive and copy from it any important archived files.