Everyday, people inquire of me as to how to deal with crashed hard drive recovery problems. I find this amusing because crashed hard drive recovery is actually one of the easiest types of data recovery tasks to accomplish. Consider that when you discover damaged digital image files on a working hard drive you must backtrack the file transfers until you find a digital storage location wherein the original file structure is undamaged. Or consider that when attempting to recover Microsoft Word documents, very often a portion of the lost file was not saved in a recognizable folder. Those two data recovery problems are far more difficult to solve than simply opening and accessing files on a crashed hard drive.
Truthfully, there are at least a dozen ways to rescue hard drive files. To begin with, you could load onto a CD or USB drive any version of Linux, and then use that operating system to copy of files. You could also remove your hard drive and connect it by use of cables to a working PC. You would also then be able to copy out the files. The best way to find and recover any file stored on a crashed hard drive is simply to load a Windows based standalone file recovery program onto your computer by means of your CD/DVD disk drive.