Originally Posted by ArchaicArcane

OK,.. then you're probably correct. Any reasonably modern system should have about 400w at least. Most of the systems I was building 3 years ago had a minimum of 500w, usually closer to 750W. You never want to be running these PS' at the peak of their abilities. They die faster and become unstable in the meantime. If you want to test the drive, unplug the DVD-Rom, and any other peripherals (flash card reader, etc) and any extraneous USB devices (other than mouse and keyboard). If the drive is still good, it will have enough power with a bare bones system like that. A HD doesn't actually take a lot of power. I suspect though that the PS is unstable, and killing devices. (Or less likely there's a fault with the motherboard - I had a laptop doing that about 8 years ago. It was heat related.) I fail to see what modem is going to do to harm a machine. It may require slightly more power than a network card, but both are drawing similar power (since they're both likely PCI / PCI-E devices.) Sounds like your IT guys are as good as some of the NSOSMG (not-so-OSMG) we hear about.

If the drive spins, I can recover data from it. I might be able to walk you through it via PM. You'd just have to find someone to download and burn some legal software for you (it's a big download is why)