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Hi Richard, I used to work for a company that built hard drives. I designed the test equipment to test every aspect and parameter. Your hard drive is unable to settle onto the tracks on the drive, probably due to a dying/dead preamp on the disk drive heads, or it could be mechanical failure such as a head crash, or bad bearings. The freezer trick might work, if there is an component that is failing due to accumulated heat stress. There are few options at this stage. If the problem is a head crash, your data is lost forever for all practical purposes. The only recovery method here would be to remove the platter assembly ,mount it on a test fixture in a class 100 clean room and read what can be read off the drive by reading the tracks directly and running diagnostic recovery software. This is expensive. If the problem is electronic (more probable), then the data may be easily recovered by replacing the electronic assembly (circuit board) with one from an identical model. This does not always work because it is very difficult to find an identical model for an older drive. I have successfully recovered data from dead IDE and SCSI disks by replacing the circuit board, which had died. Yours may be recoverable using this method , or not. Unless the drive is failing to spin up, NEVER NEVER NEVER hit it. The only time you want to hit the drive is when has "stiction". This is caused by the head sticking to the platter and can sometimes be "fixed" by gently tapping the drive from the side with the handle of a rubberized screwdriver. Hitting a spinning drive can cause the heads to crash, which will physically remove parts of the tracks. On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 22:20 -0500, Richard Wiggins 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 Barry A. Tigner Electronics Shop manager Physics and Astronomy department Michigan State University [log in to unmask] 517-884-5538