Sometimes I help out at our support desk so as to keep in touch with our software users. A common theme that seems to continue over the years is the habit of people to automatically reload Windows when their PC will not start up. Obviously this is a good and logical choice as the Windows prompt from the error screen is telling you that you are missing operating system files.
But it seems a universal gap in thinking that we reload Windows without realizing that the process of reformatting our hard drive as part of that reload will basically delete all of our stored files. We then are faced with a more difficult hard drive recovery task. Hard drive recovery software will read all of your reformatted files as deleted and offer them up for recovery. But wouldn’t it be far easier to open that hard drive and access the files before they are reformatted? Yes of course it would and that same program used for hard drive recovery after reloading Windows will do an even better job if used before.