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It sounds like you might be better off slaving the drive to another computer and getting the data off that way. At this point, it is not easy to distinguish from a failing drive and some form of software error but slaving the drive is the safe route in case the drive is about to stop functioning. _____ From: MSU Network Administrators Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ramon Hernandez Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 7:39 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] How hard should you hit an ailing hard drive? 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