You have to admire the patience of technology advice columnists. They deal with all sorts of remarkably specific requests. I imagine they get letters like this:
Dear Mr. Techsmart: I have a 20MB Candak CT03-X43 32-bit fat-formatted HD that has stopped working. The computer recognizes it but can't quite place the name, just like Grandpa before we finally got him in to the doctor. He's OK now, but the drive just gets ejected with the error message "A fatal error has occurred." Can I save it? Signed, Frantic
My response would be, "Have you heard of this thing called Google?" My second response would be to make up everything, because how's this guy going to know? He has a 20MB hard drive, which means he's probably running Windows 97. So I'd say:
Dear Frantic: The Candak CT03-X43 was on the market for three days in 1991 and was withdrawn due to data corruption issues. And I mean corruption: Pictures you stored of innocent children would show cigarettes in their mouths, Gregorian chants were replaced with devil-worshipers yelling Latin backward, and so on.
The manufacturer sent out exorcism instructions, which required you to shout "The power of Gates commands you" several times as the hard disk rose from the desk and floated toward the ceiling.
Looks like you have one that's still corrupted. I advise you to open up the case, expose the drive, use a magnifying glass and see if you can detect any pictures or word-processing documents on the disk. If not, discard in a fire.
Dear Mr. Techsmart: I bought a new monitor but it won't do anything but show the screen saver. It's pretty; it has nice pictures of tropical fish moving back and forth, but I can't get it to show my files. I've enclosed a picture so you can see the make and model. Signed, Something's Fishy
Dear Something's Fishy: What you have is actually an aquarium, not a monitor. This is a frequent point of confusion with today's high-def screens and their realistic images. The best way to see if you do, in fact, have an aquarium is to leave it alone for a month and see if the fish are still swimming.