Hard Disk Data Recovery Problems

Turned on my computer after the weekend to find that it was a black screen with the message BOOTMGR Missing. I had no idea what this means but apparently having a trawl through the internet on an Ipad I found out that the boot sectors are either missing or badly damaged. I found a site that suggested reinstalling my operating system or just putting the install disc in. I did this and the operating system seemed to be starting to boot but then it asked me to press f8 to repair the operating system. I pressed this thinking it would solve the problem but it hasn’t. When the machine rebooted it did the same again only this time I’m getting a white line going across the bottom of the screen as though Windows is starting but then it goes straight to black and shows me BOOTMGR Missing again. I wouldn’t mind if the disk was old but I’ve only had it a matter of a year tops. It’s a Toshiba 2TB DT Series supposedly. I could get a new one and think I’m going to have to but at the minute I have information relating to my law degree that I need to get at ASAP. HELP!!!!!

I have a 2 and a half-inch SATA drive that I was using in a laptop but then moved it over to my Apple Mac G5. It worked great for about a month but all of a sudden when I switch on the G5 it is telling me that the disc isn’t mounting. I don’t know the make of the drive because it came out of another laptop and there was no name on it. But it worked fine and I was very careful with it when I installed it in the G5. My first thought was that I had damaged it in some way or had maybe knocked it off its bearings but it seems to want to boot. The drive is 750gb and again I thought that perhaps the G5 couldn’t cope with it but apparently it can. My big problem is that I have over 15,000 images on there as I’m a big Sci-Fi nerd and I didn’t back them up because I thought everything would be straightforward which it was to a degree. Is there anything you can do to help me retrieve my pictures as it took me years to accumulate them and I’ve heard a lot of scary stories about so-called disk recovery software.