On May 2, 16:53, PG Manney wrote: Not seen, but heard... Some time ago, I had a little Seagate 50MB drive on running on the shelf above a workstation. I knew it had a stiction problem, so I tended to leave it running most of the time. So there I was, minding my own business, as they say, and suddenly there was a very loud BANG. I couldn't see anything amiss, but I shut things down anyway. Then I realised any damage that was going to be done by whatever went bang had presumably already happened. I wasn't going to find much out by staring at a blank screen, so I powered everything up again. All came to life, but the Seagate just reported disk errors. Tried reformatting; no joy. So I took it apart. Every platter had huge circular gouges, and two of the heads were in bits, mostly embedded in the walls of the disk chamber. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Dept. of Computer Science University of York