Ed,
Your files are probably not deleted, but the drive or controller is bad. You did not say if this is an internal or external drive?
I have a number of USB hardware adapters that allow me to extract files off of drives that have had some kind of catastrophic failures, however occasionally the drive is so badly damaged that I cannot see anything on the drive. This is true when your drive motor is gone bad and the disk will not even turn.
If your disk is turning but you cannot read the disk using USB converters, then you might try looking at some of the software solutions available...and if the data is critical, you can send the harddrive to a service that specializes in extracting data off of dead drives...but that is really expensive...They take all the readable data off the old drive and copy it too a new drive. The new drive is included in the price...so you are generally looking at several hundred dollars for the data extraction, and there is no guarantee that they will recover all your data, or even any of your data.
The best prevention is backups, backups, and more backups. I recommend a NAS system with Raid-! which means you get a Master and Slave copy of your data. I also recommend getting a good aftermarket Backup software and not rely on Windows Backups or the Backup services/software that may have come from your computer manufacturer.
I use Macrium Reflect Backup/Imaging software. It is not the only one out there but it is a fully functioning free backup software. It will make an Image copy of any disk and is 100% reliable. I have used it numerous times to restore an old laptop when I was trying various versions of Windows-7, 8, and 8.1 that came with a lot of additional unwanted software...grrrrr
The free backup software only makes image copies and restores (the entire disk) but I also wanted to be able to restore individual directories/files without restoring the whole drive, so I purchased licenses for the full version of Macrium Reflect. I converted all my PC's to Windows 8-1 and Macrium Reflect never missed a beat.
...Rich