Alas, the hard disk in the wide-screen Toshiba died today. I have had a near uncountable number of hard disks dating back to 1986 and I don't think I ever had one go bad on me. I probably should have known that there was a problem due to the extremely slow boots of late. Hindsight is 20/20.
I really thought that I had hit a run of good luck when I remembered a mobile drive from an old laptop in my cupboard. When I tossed an old Acer with a bad screen, I took out the hard drive before recycling. I was thinking in terms of data privacy more than spare parts. I thought I'd saved myself $60 when I found it. There was an extra adapter on it so I thought the connectors were different but the guy in a new computer repair place on 6th, showed me that I could just pull it off with a little force.
I came back all happy, but after plugging in the old drive, which should contain Windows 7, the laptop says "No Bootable Media". Darn. Windows 10 would be headed to both inoperative drives in just a few more weeks -- for free. Now, I have to go through a lot of rigmarole getting an operating system on a new drive. I think I have some Windows 7 CDROMs but they most probably were all upgrade disks requiring a working OS on the computer.
Sigh.