Drive/data problem, please help

My (Windows XP) PC crashed today, and when I rebooted, Windows no longer saw my F: drive or it's partitions (F:, G:. H:, and I: ).

Computer Management > Disk Management shows that F: is healthy but unformatted, so I assume that the boot records have gone. Is there any way I can return the drive to normal and save the files, or at least save the files? All of my saved downloads are on there.

Sorting out the physical drive should be no problem, of course - unless it's physically damaged then I can reformat and repartition it, but I really want to rescue the data from it.

Why do we never back anything up until it's too late?

 

Fixed it, thanks to a great piece of software called Bootit ( http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-next-generation.htm ) which after I installed it to the PC, wrote a disc with it, and reset and booted my PC came up with a list of my hard drives and options, and I selected the problem hard drive, and selected "Write EMBR", and it did so, and when I reset all my drives were back to normal!

Hopefully if anyone here has the same problem then Bootit will work for you too. I'm going to get some DVDs later on to start backing up some stuff. If nothing else, it will allow me to clear some hard drive space.