I knew this day would come but not so soon...

Today I was wanting to check out a few things on the web with Mom's
Dell, and so with WebTV being stubborn and slow for some reason, I go to
switch on the Dell.

It gets to the XP bootup screen and no further action from the hard
drive. Oh great. What's wrong now?? Why now???

I ran a memory test and it was OK. Numerous hard drive tests say the
drive is OK. I try FIXMBR and FIXBOOT, but it won't get past the XP logo
and the animated bar.

So I try the reinstall CD again. I try to get it to repair the current
installation. It takes a look, deletes some files, meaning I'll need to
reapply SP3, and it's taking forever to copy files back onto the hard
drive.

I don't know if the hard drive is actually bad or what. I have another
40G Seagate ready to put in if it comes to that. I'm glad I did a little
backup and exporting of the registry not too long ago to external
drives.

I don't know what's wrong and I don't know what it will cost to fix it.
I can put in a hard drive no problem. I knew this was going to happen
eventually, but after 3 days of not being used? Maybe mom was doing the
right thing in using it every day.

EDIT: Additional: The HD was doing this heavy vibration through the process of trying to copy Windows setup files to the drive. I eventually got the whole process to stop and the drive never booted. I ended up ordering a new Seagate Barracuda 80G drive off NewEgg, and then went for a DVD burner for the other P4.