Just imagine this: you've been working on that important paper for the past 2 weeks, and you are just about to finish it. The deadline is in a few days. You save your document, go for a coffee and when you get back, your screen is black. Your computer rebooted itself automatically and is now stuck in the bootup process with a message similar to this: No boot device, please insert a bootable media. You try to restart your computer a few times, but it does not fix your problem.

Luckily, there is a happy ending with a successful data recovery using free software File Recovery by PC Inspector. Disk utilities don't always work, however, and we should all fear and prepare for the day this happens to us with regular (nightly, if possible) backups and extra precaution with the Great American Novel or thesis you made tons of progress on today.

Scan your PC with Windows Live. The Windows Live Safety Center scans your PC for "viruses, wasted disk space, maintenance issues and common open ports." The online scanner only works using Internet Explorer and requires downloading and running ActiveX scanner files (ironic, no?). The scan can take some time to run (in fact, mine is still running) but looks to be a useful tool to snag PC nasties before they get you.

How to permanently delete data from your hard drive.

The New York Times says that properly destroying data on old used hard drives is one of the biggest overlooked data privacy measures. If you're selling, giving away, recycling, donating or disposing of a computer or old hard drive, be sure to wipe it clean first. Deleting files the regular way doesn't actually remove the data; it just removes the pointer to the data, making it easy for undelete programs to resurrect it and get to your private information. The Times recommends a bunch of software options for secure deletion; most notably the freely-available open source program called Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) for Windows. Mac OS X's built-in Disk Utility can do secure deletes using the Defense Department standard.

Hard drive janitor.

If I let it, my hard drive would fill to capacity with crap I don't need. Throughout the course of one day I get my paws on all sorts of throwaway files: video, images and songs meant for a single viewing or listen, PDF's I have to print, software installers and big ol' zip files I extract and do whatever I need to with the contents. The end result is a bunch of stuff hogging space on my hard drive for no good reason.

I'm lazy and I don't want to have to clean up after myself every time I work with a set of files. Instead, I've scheduled a cleanup script that sweeps through my hard drive every evening while I sleep. My virtual janitor deletes any temporary file that's been sitting around for more than x days, like old garbage starting to stink. This way space on my hard drive is constantly recovered, and I don't have to worry about getting the dreaded "Low disk space" message at the critical moment I'm about to conceive my opus. Because you know if you were going to run out of disk space, that's when it would happen. Check the full article here.

BartPE. BartPE is a free utility that lets you build a live CD-based copy of Windows XP that can be used for data recovery.

Bart's PE Builder helps you build a "BartPE" (Bart Preinstalled Environment) bootable Windows CD-Rom or DVD from the original Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 installation/setup CD, very suitable for PC maintenance tasks.

It will give you a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800x600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files to a network share, virus scan and so on.

          Update: A reader writes in about a useful extension:

Even better than BartPE is "UBCD for Windows". It uses Bart's PE Builder to create not just a bootable Windows CD, but a bootable Windows CD with many useful tools included - antivuris, browsers, PDF Reader, CD burner, drive backup/cloning tools, diagnostics, recovery tools, etc. See the full list here.