Alan Gorham wrote:
> Has anybody had any experience with the SMPS on their PC exploding?

By exploding you mean a SMPS capacitor just ruptured?
There is no other thing in there to "explode".
A ruptured capacitor will definitely drop the voltage its output voltage,
so no further problem could be done, the power supply itself will shutdown
due lack of "power good return line" from the motherboard.

>
> This has happened to me and it seems to have fried most of the PC.
>

Well, of course, things can happens, fried PC can happens even with a good
and working SMPS.


> The most valuable/least easily replacable part of the system is my
> hard-drive. Although I've kept back-ups of most of the important
> data, it would be nice to think I could rescue my
> existing drive.
>

This is why the planned HD is important.
Start with a formatted unit, install EVERYTHING you want, then make a
partition copy to CDs, it will not use more than 3 or 4 CDs at all.  Then
start to use and keep backups from your actual job.
If by some reason you loose your HD, the partition copy CDs will restore
exactly that partition to a new HD in question of minutes, restore the data
backup and you are running as before in less than 15 minutes.

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