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AAAaaaaaaaaa! DON'T HIT IT! At least not yet. If it boots windows the control electronics are OK; thats a good sign. That you can boot Windows says that the basic head movement is sound too, also a good sign. So then, I'd say that an op-amp on the disk isn't working, or something like that such that parts of the disk aren't readable. The clicking sounds you are hearing are signs of the control electronics being confused during a seek and the heads retract in an attempt to recalibrate. My trick is to take the disk out and cool it in the freezer. Not to make it it super cold, but definitely cold to the touch. Then stuff it back in the system and try to reboot it. If that doesn't work, make it colder. Usually the first pass will bring the disk to life briefly. There have been times when I've had to get a disk colder to read it, but usually it works. Usually. Hitting a disk is akin to gently letting a wrecking ball hit your car. Yes, it can work--it can dislodge small (microscopic) parts of crud clinging to the heads, or unstick head arm, but this isn't something I willingly do. You can kill the disk completely, if you wind up moving a head thats loose at the end of the arm. Making it move a few microns can result in a gouge and thats the end of the disk. The other trick is to put the disk in some other machine such that you aren't booting from it, but mounting it and perhaps data can be read off the disk during the first nn seconds that the disk is on. I have one of those here at home--it works for about 40 seconds then fails. If you want help email me. People at work think that I have a plentiful supply of rabbits for disk disasters.... --STeve Andre' On Tuesday 13 January 2009 22:20:57 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