I thought I had posted this this morning but I don't see it. I it is duplicated somewhere else let me know and I will erase it.
As Jethro suggested above and the other thread, I took several passes of dmesg with and without the HD on (and not working) and my flash USB. I redirected it to 3 files that are in my root directory but I can't get them out. I'm using putty - is the a "file " command to send them to my PC. I tried sending them to my flah drive using:
cp /root/*.txt /media/usb/sda1/*.txt I can see them on the drive so they seem to get copied but I can't see them with my PC (I can't seem to unmount them - maybe the files aren't being closed??? I'll keep trying if someone thinks it's important to solve my problem and then I can post them so they can read them. The easiest would be if I can get a command to send them over putty (ssh)

TIA

C