PC Problem...

[complich8]

Something to be aware of, if you're paranoid, is that what's probably hosed up is the electronics on the drive. If someone found an identical (or near-identical) drive that worked (or had bad platters or heads but a good controller), they could swap the board onto your good platters/good heads/bad electronics and have a working drive with no data loss. This is something that I've had to do to recover some data from a director-level boss's disk after all else failed, so I've got firsthand experience saying that it's not even particularly hard to do.

If there's data there that's sensitive, .... well, it's probably still not sensitive enough that someone picking through the trash is going to do that. If you've got things like ... your social security number, credit card numbers, name/address, tax returns, you might opt to dismantle and destroy the disk yourself, or maybe not, up to you.

If you ship it back to the manufacturer, they'll salvage the parts that are good and destroy the parts that are bad, but they'll also zero out any content on the resulting refurb disk before they ship it out again. They're ... usually pretty good about that.

[Animeniax]

I have an Asus P5Q Pro Turbo motherboard with a Q6600 CPU running Windows 7 32-bit. I put the computer to sleep and while it was winding down I tapped the keyboard and it started the wake up process, then shut down. Now it won't boot. When I power on the system, the fans run, the DVD drive spins up, then the system sits. No beeps, no monitor activity, no harddrive activity, and I've let it sit for 30 minutes with no activity. On the PS/2 keyboard, the only activity is the numlock light will light up/turn off when I press numlock.

Troubleshooting: I disconnected the PSU and let it sit overnight, unplugged extra drives and removed unnecessary cards, disconnected the PS/2 keyboard, unplugged the power connector from the motherboard, removed the CMOS battery and moved the jumper to clear CMOS settings.

One thing that was weird was when the system first woke from sleep, a BIOS message appeared saying I need to enter setup and load settings, which I did. After that, the motherboard will not POST. Could it be the CMOS battery is dead or the mainboard is dead?