My PC froze up last week and when my son tried to reboot, he got a message saying that a file (hal.dll) was corrupt or missing. After spending several hours trying to repair this problem with my XP disc, I called Dell and a tech rep decided that my 120 gb hard drive had cashed in. They have sent me a new one today so I will be reloading everything onto it. My question really concerns my old hard drive. Dell wants it back. I am going to try and install it as a slave long enough to get whatever files I can off it, but I have all my tax information and some other personal files on it that I do not want to send to Dell if this process doesn't work. Is there some secret to (1) Giving a frozen hard drive a kick long enough to get the files off it? or (2) Erasing the hard drive in some manner, say magnetically or some other way? I would rather lose the files rather than send them off to some anonymous stranger. Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me.