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