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Thanks to everyone for their sage advice. Although my question was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I appreciate the wisdom of the crowd -- and I love the term "percussive maintenance"! I do have a bootable Windows utilities CD which I'll use to try to scrounge anything useful off the disk. I wonder how many geeks carry around bootable thumb drives all the time? I can just see someone on an airplane undergoing a hard drive problem. The flight attendant asks gravely "Is there a nerd in the house?" -- and a NAG member rushes to the rescue. /rich PS - Barry, my wife heads the branch library in BPS. Stop by and say hey sometime. She may be looking for a new computer soon. On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 9:33 AM, tigner <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Hi Richard, > > I can loan you an external USB IDE adapter and power supply. > You have to remove the old disk, and connect it to the USB/IDE > adapter , which will then allow you to connect to another machine > via USB to attempt to recover what can be recovered. > > I'm in BPS room 1230, phone 884 5538. > > > 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 >