All of us have been through those tough moments when, after putting in many hours on a document the system or the application program suddenly collapses and leaves your document damaged or inaccessible. Sometimes the system will announce the error, sometimes it crash and fail completely. All of these unpleasant situations can lead into the loss of your data.
The most common symptoms include:
file cannot be opened or is damaged
computer will not start up (sometimes can be followed by the screen message "Missing operating system," etc.)
the system freezes while trying to open files
directory´s content is corrupt, documents are corrupted
computer makes unusual sounds
computer cannot "find" the hard disk
files cannot be accessed and/or copied
CDs (DVDs) cannot be read or copied
memory card is unreadable or seems to be unformatted
In principle, you can consider your data as lost
any time you cannot access it.
If any one of these symptoms happens to you, do not panic. Shut the computer down, do not try to restart it, and do not try to recover the data yourself. You could lose your data completely. Even restarting your computer can cause permanent damage.
You can find the detailed description of data recovery process here.
