One thing most people don’t know about “dead hard drives” is that in my experience 90% of the time or better the hard drive is not actually dead. It more than likely just has a problem with the Windows boot sequence and all the data is still recoverable. The only trouble comes in getting laptop hard drive data. This is because there is difficulty in getting the hard drive out of the laptop and into another computer. There is a special converting tool that allows you to connect either PATA or SATA hard drives via USB to another computer. If it you have a desktop hard drive then all you would have to do is plug the hard drive into the mother board and power supply, while the PC is off, and make sure the jumper settings are set to slave. When you turn on your computer you should see another hard drive in My Computer (probably drive letter E:). After you get your laptop hard drive or desktop hard drive you can navigate to your profile folder and copy and paste the data onto your working hard drive. From there you can either try to run a chkdsk /r from the Windows Recovery Console or just format the hard drive and reinstall Windows and all your applications. That is sometimes a good option especially if your computer was moving rather slow.