Success, although I was not hoping for it.

OK, so my parents left over a week ago. While they were staying with me, they were using a PC I had setup in their room. This PC started to misbehave  (as in shutting down and not responding to the reset button, freezing suddenly and so on). I thought it might be a good idea to overhaul the PC move all the components into a better case, replace some of the components and then add a new bigger drive to it.  

I started to work on it the day after my parents left and soon ran into a problem of my own making. I broke one of the pins on the IDE connector to the hard drive.  This kinda put a wrench in my plans. I proceeded without this big disk and used the older smaller disks to do the installs and such. I first installed Vista on the PC and found it to be mind numbingly slow. So I redid the install with XP, and it worked great. (maybe the components on this PC were old enough to be almost antiques). 

Now that i had a functioning PC I started to hook up my external drive to see what I had lost (or not). I found out that I had lost all of the music that was converted to MP3s from Audio tapes. the conversion of Audio tapes took my father a good 3 weeks (maybe more) to do.  This music was unfortunately on the Big Disk that I had "accidentally" borken. I fretted and fumed and then went to Ace Hardware to look see if they had a Soldering Iron to "rent". They did not have one for rent. However they did say they have a few models to sell. (what a surprise!!!) I bought  the cheapest one which would serve the purpose and some solder. I then proceeded back home opened up the disk (basically unscrewed a set of 5 screws and the controller board on the back of the disk came free. I then soldered  the broken pin (or so I think) and connected it all back. VIOLA, it worked..... So i have been busy copying my music and other stuff off that disk. (because who knows when I will break it again... )

All of this was happening while I had to feed my kids, take them out for a walk, play with them in the yard, get to them take an afternoon nap and take my afternoon nap, watch TV, eat lunch supper and so on. Phew!!!!!

All in all I am glad I got the disk to work.