About a month ago the inevitable happened. The hard drive on my wife’s home office PC, an aging Dell Optiplex SX270, failed.

Diagnosis was easy. First the machine froze, then it delivered a cryptic “MBR [Master Boot Record] not found” message, and finally after some fiddling about the machine told me the hard drive was “not found” though I was pretty sure it had not grown legs and walked out on its own.