The biggest, best advice that I could ever offer as a Search Engine Marketer, as a Website Developer, as a Graphic Designer, and hell even as a basic computer user is to back-up the information that is most important to you. It really doesn't matter how. Save it to an external hard-drive, save it to a flash drive, save it to a CD or DVD, email it to yourself, or save it on a second computer (yours, a family members, or a friends)... just ensure that you do it!

The Story
My girlfriend's laptop computer had crashed just before summer. Her operating system (Windows XP) would not boot from the hard-drive nor could we extract the information from it (so I thought). After looking into the problem, I gave her two options:

1) "I can completely clear your hard-drive (thus she'd lose everything) and I would reinstall Windows XP, your other programs, and all necessary drivers."

2) "I can do nothing and you'd be without this computer."

Now, I know a little bit about the inter-workings of a computer. I've purchased a few. I've built a few. I've upgraded a few. However, in my experiences, if a hard-drive had crashed it and the information on it was lost. To my knowledge there were no ways to reconcile a crashed hard drive.

Well, it turns out that my options weren't good enough for my girlfriend Jackie. She insisted that her information (4 years of college materials and 1 year of teaching materials) was far more valuable than having a working computer... at least at that point in time. So... we left it alone.

The Solution
This past weekend, I found myself sitting in a local "watering-hole" chatting with my friend and colleague Michael Roebuck. Some how the story of Jackie's computer ended up in our conversation and Michael offered his 2 cents... 2 cents that would pay-off big! His idea was to remove the Hard-Drive from the laptop, place it into an external hard-drive casing (one specifically for laptop-sized hard-drives), and see if I could extract the information that way. It sounded good at the time, but hell everything sounds good after a few "waters". As it turns out... it worked.

I did run into one minor problem though... I was able to view the file structure of her whole hard-drive, however, I was not able to open the files I needed nor could I extract them to my computer. Jackie, like most people, has a password-protected account in which she must sign into before logging onto her computer. Therefore, the files we wanted to extract are seen as "owned" by Jackie and will only open under her login on her computer. After a bit of searching, I found a pretty simple walk-thru which helped me to release Jackie as the owner of these files and incorporate myself and my computer as the new owner. Once done, I was able to open, view and extract all the files I needed too.

Hopefully you'll never need to do this, but should you, here's a quick run-down of the solution:

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For Laptops

1) Remove The Crashed Hard-Drive
2) Place the Hard-Drive into an External Hard-Drive Case (one specifically for Laptops)
3) Connect the now External Hard-Drive to another computer (usually via a USB cord)
4) Go to "My Computer" and locate the new External Hard-Drive
5) Extract the desired Files

For Regular Computers

1) Remove The Crashed Hard-Drive
2) Place the Hard-Drive into another Regular Computer
3) Set up the Hard-Drive as the Computer's Secondary Hard-Drive
4) Go to "My Computer" and locate the new Secondary Hard-Drive
5) Extract the desired Files

For Protected Folders and Files

Use this "How To Take Ownership of a File or Folder in Windows XP" guide, which is published on Microsoft's support website.