The computer is dead
I'm so sad the computer is dead.
My hard drive seems to have died. I'm not sure I can even recover the data thereupon, at least, not without spending hundreds of dollars on data recovery.
Two days ago, while playing a beta of "Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising," I began to hear a clicking noise from inside my case, and the performance on the game began to stutter and slow. This ended with a Blue Screen of Death; I don't remember the exact error message, as I figured the problem was due to the beta and didn't make a note of it. I hard-rebooted the machine with no particular problems, other than some clicking noises from inside the case upon reboot.
pixiecrack then used my machine to review the playlist of music for our wedding while I went and read in the other room. She noticed the clicking sound and slow and stuttering performance, and received another Blue Screen of Death.
At this point, the machine would not initialize the operating system; reboot resulted in a prompt for Safe Mode due to failure to start on previous attempts, and lots of clicking noises, and another Blue Screen of Death (error, um, from memory, 0x00006F, relating to newly-installed software or hardware causing an error). Uh oh.
Attempts to start in Safe Mode or normal mode resulted in a long hang time and a loading screen for Microsoft XP, but no actual loading of the OS. After letting one of these attempts run for an hour or so while doing something else, I turned the machine off.
The next day I had some time to play with it, so I tried booting from my XP CD. By this point, the system was giving a "Seeking diskette 0" error after POST before allowing BIOS Setup. Entering the BIOS showed that the system was not recognizing any of the drives (floppy, hard, CD) as being connected. Lots of clicking noises. I tried disconnecting the hard disk drive; this allowed me to boot from the CD drive (which was now recognized, load the OS from the CD and choose to start the Restoration program, which I did not do, as the hard disk drive was not connected. It also eliminated the clicking noises, which means that they are almost certainly coming from the hard disk drive.
Re-connecting the hard disk drive and restarting led to another failure to recognize any of the drives as connected; at this point I gave up and turned the damn thing off.
At this point, I figure I've got a head crash, and that turning the system on to play with it will just further damage the disk and make recovering any data even more difficult and expensive. So my computer is a paperweight. I can check e-mail by web from D.'s laptop or PC, but I stand to lose a great many documents, e-mail addresses, etc.
Bleah!