… but can be merciful at times.
Right.
Laugh at me, all ye geeks, but when the Maxtor diagnostics thing declared the HD dead it never crossed my mind to ask one of my “geeks” to tell me how to start that chkdsk thing from DOS again.
Well, I was advised to do so anyway, setting it to repair, and repair it did - quite a long list of repairs that was. The final diagnosis is that it has some bad sectors, but at least it seems that I have recovered all of my precious data - which I am even now transferring to my new supercool external 250GB drive. For a panic purchase it looks rather sexy. 
I’d like to thank all of my faithful readers (and possible new readers) for their concern about my HD and its data; really, I thought that was rather nice of you guys and gals.
That said, forward and onward to another topic in a new post.