"Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter" is a message most feared while booting up a computer. It could mean a number of things from a loose cable to something as serious as your partition being deleted. A loose cable is a simple fix but if your hard drive's partition is lost you just may have to call in the big boys who specialize in data recovery.

But before you pick up that phone you might want to try your hand at recovering the data yourself using widely available programs like Partition Find and Mount.

Partition Find and Mount searches your hard drive for lost or deleted partitions using 3 different scanning methods: Fast, Normal and Thorough. Each scan has their merits and should be tried in the order listed to recovery your partition. Once Partition Find and Mount locates the partition it will assign it a drive letter and mount the drive in read-only mode preventing further damage to the data. From there you can access the drive in Windows Explorer to recover your data.

Of course you will need a bootable computer to use the software. So if your only hard drive on your only computer has failed you'll need to give a friend a call to borrow their computer.

Partition Find and Mount comes in 2 varieties: Free and Pro. Both versions are nearly identical with the difference being that the free version is limited to data transfers of 512 KBytes/s while the Pro version has no speed limit imposed. Because DIY data recovery has many variables you may just want to see if the free version works for you.

The nightmare scenario: your computer won't boot. The drive seems healthy otherwise; you can access it when booting from another drive, but for some reason your drive absolutely refuses to boot. Take heart, it's possible that it can be fixed by TestDisk, a very powerful cross-platform partition recovery tool.

TestDisk was created to try to help users recover from seemingly unrecoverable scenarios. There are many things that can happen, due to either user error, or nefarious software that can cause a drive to become unbootable, but still otherwise contain all the same data. TestDisk can handle the majority of these situations. Amazingly, TestDisk can handle a massive list of file systems, and can be run under any of the following environments:

• DOS (either real or in a Windows 9x DOS-box),
• Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003),
• Linux,
• FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
• SunOS and
• MacOS

While it's not something to play with casually, TestDisk is exactly the kind of utility you want around when you run into trouble.