No Hammers, but still brute force
I had an old Compaq laptop given to me, in the mid nineties - I was still at school and used it for learning to program and school work. The hard disk started to fail on startup, you could hear it trying to spin, but couldn't - a wack (from my fist) used to sort it out...for a while. Then it stopped. While I kept some important stuff backed up on floppy disks, I didn't have enough disks for everything. So I proceeded to take the disk apart, and manually move the heads out of park. Believe it or not, this actually worked and continued to work for some months..pop the top off, flick heads out, pop the top back on and slot it back in, by the end I wasn't even putting the screws back in. Oh, and I did this with the power on!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
