Absolutely, positively nothing is worse than I hard drive failure for someone who trying to get some work done on the old computer.
I turned the old Mac off for a few hours and than went back to get some more work done. Nothing happening. Holy crap. Back-up? I wish. Time to run some data recovery software. Problem is can I find the disks. Ok they got moved in the last big clean up. Finally found and well after sweating a few buckets things are back.