Over at the Tech Hints blog [ http://tech-hints.org/ ] is probably the definitive guide to recovering data from a dead hard drive that you forgot to back up, from beginning to end, start to finish. I think everyone’s been in the position where they had a hard drive that up and died on them and they either forgot to back up recently, never backed up, or that isn’t theirs and belongs to a friend who either forgot to back up or never backed up, (this is why you should back up your data!) so this is something that can apply to everyone, and everyone can relate.
Starting off with educating you about different file systems and what the acronyms mean (FAT and NTFS, for example) the article starts off with the conceptual and moves into the practical, covering simple situations where you might have just damaged the Master Boot Record (MBR) or accidentally deleted a partition (in which case the data’s not gone, just the partition table’s busted) all the way up to suggesting some file recovery applications, both small and big guns, that you can run against the drive to try and get your data back. And at the end, the author even suggests some more reccomended commercial software that promises to get your data back as well. Another bookmark-worthy article, for that time that you know will be coming soon…if you don’t back up your data!