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On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 10:20 PM, Richard Wiggins <[log in to unmask] > wrote: > My wife's home computer, a very kewl as of 2001 Gateway desktop-and-monitor > PC, died today. The hard drive is able to begin to boot Windows XP -- you > see the logo -- so that implies that some data is loading from the disk. > However you hear lots of seeking noises, and ultimately no finding. > > We probably don't have much data to salvage on it. I find that in a cloud > computing world, I've Gmailed just about anything of importance to her or to > whaterver person I'm working with. > > Still, I would like to take one last look at the hard drive. So my question > is, and I'm not kidding -- how hard do I hit it? Do I pick up the unit and > drop it? Do I take a rubber mallet to it? Do I gently tap it as it tries > to boot? > > Reminds me of a wisecrack circa 1979 -- on a clear disk, you can seek > forever. > > Thanks, > > /rich > I have heard that you can stick a hard drive in a freezer over the course of a night or two and that is good enough to get them unstuck for a little while. I know of one or two people in real life that have done this with success. --Ray