

In that case, you'll have to hook up your hard drive to another machine and try to recover files secondhand. If you lose data due to a virus, hard drive corruption or good, old-fashioned gremlins, you may not be able to launch Windows at all. If not, see if the company offers live chat, email addresses, website query forms or active social media pages. The best companies will have tech support available by phone - 24/7, if possible, as the odds of your big data emergency happening during normal business hours are slim. While data recovery programs are fairly self-explanatory, the process can be a tricky business, and it's good to have a resource if things go wrong (well, wrong-er).
