Alex Bird wrote:
Sam Goldwasser wrote in message
...

I'd think that a failed
power supply destroying both harddrives without damaging the
mainboard would also be unusual.

Hah! My brother's died and took everything but the monitor with it.

On topic, modern hard drives don't appear to have fuses, at least not
like the obvious ones on older IBMs (square sm ceramic things marked
1A)...

ALex

Funny thing is, that whenever I've had catastropic computer failure--usually
traced to a surge of some sort on the a.c. line--the hard drive is the one
thing that usually survives. I've repaired at least a dozen computers in
which nothing else worked, but the drives were salvable. In fact, I can
only recall one instance where 'everything' went. Even a machine that took
a major jolt, which split a 150 year old oak tree in the back yard, had
salvable pieces. The modem, of course was dead...in fact, the chips on
board had pieces blown off them. The mobo never worked again. Even the
laser printer which was attached, had it's port burned out. The fairly high
quality speakers attached had one tweeter fried. All of the memory was
toast.

The drives (all of them) survived.

jak