said by El Quintron:An easy way to prevent a catastrophe that I've found, is by keeping your datas and OSes on separate drives, at least that way if one drive goes you're not completely screwed.
....which of course is not the Windoze default setting.
I do keep some of my data on other physical drives, even better on other PCs across my LAN, and/or on external USB hard drives.
But there is some with which I have been complacent and need to catch up - docs, bookmarks, & downloaded web pages - all of which default to C: .