So, apparently the infamous 'clicking death' problem that some Toshiba 1.8" notebook hard disks are notorious for finally happened to me.

The VAIO was okay for a while the night before the crash, until I noticed the system began slowing to a crawl; the hard disk LED light was staying lit instead of blinking occasionally like it normally did. Then the dreaded BSOD (blue screen of death) came up. I did a reboot and the notebook could no longer boot into Windows. The hard disk LED light stayed conspicuously lit.

Crap.

I created a boot CD and got into DOS, all ready to copy the data out to an external hard disk when I realized DOS didn't do USB!, a fact that I'd conveniently forgotten after years of windows & dialog boxes.

After a little Googling, I found a driver called DUSE that apparently detects and mounts external storage devices on USB in DOS. But I could not get it to work because the boot CD (the VAIO does not have a floppy disk drive) that the Nero CD burning program created runs Caldera DR-DOS, and somehow the floppy emulation doesn't show the DUSE executable.

Fuck.

Running the Recovery Console achieved nothing as there were no SYS errors or anything of that sort. Nothing indicated a corrupted boot configuration. It was just that the hard disk was seeking excessively. Sector corruption, most likely.

Fuckity-fuck.

The only way now to dissect the notebook and get the hard disk out. To compound the problem, the VAIO uses a 1.8" hard disk, and having searched Sim Lim Square in futile for a 1.8"-to-2.5" IDE connector, I had to settle for an external case.

Surgery shall begin in 10 minutes' time.

*Flexes fingers*

Oh well, here goes nothing…