Let's face it. System crash happens, and it usually happens when you are least expected and least prepared. That's why you need to learn how to discover problem before hand.

The old tools for recovering hard disk doesn't work well anymore ever since Microsoft heavily pushed the NTFS file system ever since WinNT and now on most of the WinXP machine. Most the old Window based rescure application failed to deal with NTFS.

Fortunately, the new breed of tool rose to handle NTFS. Ironically, most guru recommend Linux based tool, like the Linux Live CD boot up disk, and use Linux tools to fix partition, rescure NTFS files, and so on.

SystemRescueCd is one of those, and you can learn more about it by going to http://www.sysresccd.org/ . It's free, so you won't loss much by trying it.

There��s another commercial tool called SpinRite (6.0). http://grc.com/default.htm . Several gurus highly recommended it for recovering corrupted disk, and provided great result.

I am going to trying out the above two schemes sometime this week, and see how well they work.

In addition, the site provide some very useful information about rescure your system using bootCD: http://www.oion.net/qnd/bootcd/