Hard drives can crash or go bad for a number of reasons.

Firstly, check out what is the cause.Remove the hard drive of your computer and install it into another computer that has a Windows operating system on as a slave drive. Check to see if the motherboard is causing the problem. The motherboard could be causing similar problems. If so, consider it as a lesson and copy your data to another drive.

If the hard drive can be detected (shows up in ‘my computer’ as drive letter like drive G:) but you can’t access your data on it, you can recover data from hard drive with third party hard drive data recovery program. I have a good one on my computer that can recover data from hard drive after deeply scanning your drive to look for lost data due to drives crash, physical damage, system sabotage, virus corrupted partitions etc. You can get it here: http://www.any-data-recovery.com/product/datarecoveryprofessional.htm

Download data recovery program Tenorshare Data Recovery and install it on the computer not the bad hard drive. Do not attempt to install or write anything on the drive, as it may overwrite the data you want to recover.

Step 1: Run Tenorshare Data Recovery. If you accidentally deleted files on the drive, select ‘Deleted Recovery’. If you accidentally formatted the drive, being attacked by virus or unable to access your data, select ‘Format Recovery’. Hard disk crashes, power failure, system sabotage, etc may result in data loss. ‘Partition Recovery’ will be available for you. If the files are seriously damaged and you can’t recover them with deleted recovery and format recovery. Raw Recovery is available for you.

Step 2: Select the logical or physical hard drive that contains your lost data. (A logical drive means a partition or virtual drive and a physical drive means a whole hard drive. Some drives are divided in to multiple partitions. )Click ‘Scan’ to deeply search for lost data.

Step 3: Select the files list on the taskbar and click ‘Recover’ to start hard drive data recovery.

Step 4: Select a path for the recovered files. Click ‘OK’ to complete recovering data from hard drive.

If the hard drive can’t be detected by your computer, you can try this way.

Put the hard drive in a plastic bag to be compatible for the freezer. Freezing sometimes works to revive a dying hard drive, at least for a short time(Probable just about 20 minutes), but be sure that the bag is sealed tightly so that condensation and ice crystals don't form. Put it in your freezer for 24 hours that will do the trick. While it’s still cold, plug it into your computer.

Check to see if the hard drive shows up. If it does, quickly go to where your data is stored and transfer it over to another drive. Once the drive warms up, you may be unable to access your data again. If it still doesn't boot, send it to professionals to recover data from hard drive.

There is no guarantee that any of these methods will work. You may still lose your data. The only way to prevent data loss when dealing with computers is to make backups of important data on an external hard drive or flash drive.

Recovering hard drive data can be a difficult and complex task. You may want to bring the hard drive to a professional hard drive data recovery company which will cost you $1000 or more. This is a pricey way that is no guarantee for data recovery. But if the lost data is valuable, it may be a better option than do it yourself.

Tips: With enough effort you can probably find freeware or shareware to recover data from hard drive. But commercial hard drive data recovery software distributors can usually charge the prices they charge because their software does the job better and more quickly.