On Mon, 26 May 2014 09:40:34 -0400, Wolf K wrote:

your _first_ concern should be to get all your
data off the disk drive

This is good advice, as had been all the prior advice.

I am heading down to Radio Shack today, if they're open, to pick
up an SATA/ATA USB adapter, which will make it very easy to get
all the data off the hard disk drive.

I've done that step before, and, even better, I recently
made a backup of my data hierarchy only about a month
ago, so there really isn't much data that I need to
back up incrementally anyway.