If your computer won’t start you might be pulling out your hair at the prospect of losing all your precious data. But all isn’t necessarily lost.

If the drive is corrupted or dead, you are in a pickle. Any attempt to retrieve data in that case is going to be very difficult and possibly cost an arm and a leg.

But the PC may not be starting for a more benign reason – i.e., the power supply is on the blink or there’s a corrupted sector, in which case your data may well be intact. There are two main options if that’s the case, either to boot from a USB flash drive or remove the drive entirely and plug it into a working computer. Here we walk you through the former and give you advice on the latter.

Option 1: Create a bootable Windows USB drive

This is the method to try if your PC still t

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