Hard Disk Drive failure

[Therm0]

So I was doing some things for my dad on our home pc and noticed that his version of chrome was about 6 months past on an update, so I decided to change that. After all the chrome tabs closed, I was met with a BSOD and now the monitor only states "Hard Disk Drive failure. F1 to continue or F2 to SETUP. " He's never made a back up of his files and thinks lightly of the situation but I don't think he understands what just happened. I know the next step is to try and recover his files, but I have no idea how to go about starting to save them. Any help would be appreciated, thank you.

 

[popatim]

Step1 would be to determine how important these files are.
Extremely important = send the drive out for recovery.

Files that Would be nice to have back but ok to be lost forever = go ahead and try recovery yourself
- First locate a drive to recover your files to. Either an external drive or another pc that has enough space on its harddrive.
- Next run recovery software on the drive, saving any files to the 'recovery' drive (above)

Some recovery windows based software would be Recuva, PhotoRec, Data Recovery Wizard, Power Data Recovery... (lots of them out there)
Command line based - TestDisk (and IMO the best)