
If it happens regularly, you have a problem that needs fixing. If it happens occasionally, you curse, reboot, and get on with your work.

One second you’re working productively, the next you’re staring at a blue screen filled with meaningless white text. Blue Screens of Death Attack Your PC Regularly BlueScreenView can show what Windows was doing before disaster struck. If that doesn’t work, you’ll need to use a retrieval service.ģ. Once you’ve paid the $70 license fee, the program can copy the files to another drive. The free, demo version of Recover My Files will show you which files can be recovered (almost all of them, when I tested it) and even display their contents. You can do so by making it a secondary drive in a desktop PC, or by using a SATA-USB adapter such as the Bytecc USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA Adapter Kit. If the sick drive is the one you use to boot Windows, you’ll have to remove it from the PC and access it on another computer. If your drive sounds okay, however, you may be able to recover the files for only $70 with GetData’s Recover My Files. Expect to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Drivesavers and Kroll Ontrack are the best known, although they’re not necessarily better than smaller, cheaper companies. In that case you have only one possible solution, and it’s expensive: Send the drive to a data-retrieval service. If the drive is making noises that you’ve never heard before, shut off the PC immediately. If you can’t access your hard drive, Recover My Files might be able to do what its name implies.
