It could be just the break they've been looking for. Or it could be just another in a long line of leads that go nowhere.

That's how Bellefonte police are viewing the discovery of what could be missing Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar's computer hard drive.

His laptop computer was found back in July in the Susquehanna River in Lewisburg, Union County, but with its most important part, the hard drive, missing.

The hard drive was found three weeks ago by a woman and her child who were throwing stones along the river bank, They spotted it on a dry piece of land about 15 feet from the river bank, about 100 yards upstream from where the laptop was found. They retrieved it and turned it over to the state police at Milton.

Bellefonte police announced the discovery yesterday. They said they didn't release news of the find earlier because they hoped that they'd have real information to share after the hard drive was analyzed.

"That could be key to the whole case," said Officer Darrel Zaccagni, the lead investigator on the Gricar case.

State police computer experts turned the hard drive over to the FBI in Philadelphia, which then sent it to another facility in California, Officer Zaccagni said.

"It's in really bad shape," he said.

Even if the hard drive was submerged in the river for six months, though, it's still possible information could be recovered from it, said Special Agent Tim Huff of the FBI's Computer Analysis Response Team.

The information stored on a hard drive is recorded on small plastic or metal disks, called platters. Even if the casing of the hard drive is destroyed, the platters can be inserted into a new casing and read that way, Agent Huff said.

Besides damaging the platters, the only sure-fire way to remove information permanently from a hard drive is to scramble it, called "degausing," or to use what's called a "wiping" device, he said.

"You have to have a little more knowledge than a standard user," Agent Huff said. "Most people tend to think if you delete a hard drive, the information's gone, and that's not the case."

Typically, hard drives like the one in this case are sent by the FBI to a contracted facility to be analyzed. They are placed in a "clean," or "white room," which is a sterile environment specifically designed for computer work.

"We're still not 100 percent sure it's his," Officer Zaccagni said. "Circumstantially, it looks like his. It fits his computer."

Officer Zaccagni is unsure if any information can be recovered from the hard drive, but if so, he said, it could be the break in the case they've been waiting for.

In the six months Mr. Gricar has been missing, Bellefonte police have not been able to determine if he was the victim of foul play, if he committed suicide or if he just chose to disappear.

"For just about every scenario, it could give us information," Officer Zaccagni said.

If Mr. Gricar decided to walk away, the hard drive could reveal travel plans or financial records police have not found elsewhere. If he committed suicide, Officer Zaccagni suggested, the prosecutor might have kept a journal on his computer. If he was involved in an investigation into some criminal activity, the hard drive could contain that information, as well.

Mr. Gricar, who was set to retire at the end of this year, went missing on April 15. That morning, he had called his live-in girlfriend and told her he would be taking the day off from work. When he called, he was driving through Penns Valley toward Lewisburg. His car, a red and white Mini Cooper, was found there the next evening. There have been no confirmed sightings since.

Mr. Gricar's nephew, Tony Gricar, said he was surprised that something that's barely 2 inches by 3 inches would be found in a river.

"When you're talking about a river, you can't get much more like a needle in the haystack," Tony Gricar said.

His family won't speculate on what, if anything, the found hard drive could mean.

"We're not going to get ahead of ourselves," he said. "We're hoping something can come off of it, to give another step to go on."