answer:Download parted magic, burn it to a cd, and pop it in, if the hard drive hasn’t totally failed, you can access the data through the file manager and copy it to an external drive, I use it for all my data recovery. Also, backup backup backup. I recently spent $500 on a new rack mount server (I play with rack mount stuff in my spare time, and my other one was getting old), that can take 8 hard drives, upgradable to 16, meaning over time I can get it up to 64tb of storage space. It will let me back up my computer plenty, but I’ll still use an external drive too, and so should you. As they say, if your data doesn’t exist in 3 places, it doesn’t exist at all. Actually, I spent about $600 something with the cost of a 2tb drive to start things off. edit: oh yeah, you will need to tell the computer to boot from cd, it should pop up with a message to tell you what key to press to choose a boot device, if not, use the setup key and look for boot order, or something along those lines.