URGENT! My computer crashed
 

I woke up this morning to see my computer in the BIOS boot up thing and telling me something about there not being a boot disk (like CD or whatever), which is extremely odd. I press hard reset and to my great surprise, Windows XP is incapable of loading. Everything seems normal for the booting up until the part where the Windows XP logo usually appears on screen. All I get then is a black screen. Prior to that the machine has

San Devices, Please wait . . .
Press <TAB> key to enter User Window

Serial_Ch0 Master: STrandom numbers
Serial_Ch1 Master: Maxtorrandomnumbers

then it will go to the black screen instead of the Windows XP booting icon.

I have some very important documents for school and med school applications that I forgot to back up this week that are on my main Windows Partition that I would like to recover. Other than that, I don't care and will be willing to reformat and reinstall everything. However, at this point I don't know where the problem is. I had left the machine on while I slept running uTorrent so that I could grab a few films overnight.

I'm posting from my brothers computer now.

I have a feeling your disk died.

Try putting your hard drive in another computer and backing up your files, if possible. After that, just try re-installing Windows.

I just finished testing the drive @ McGill with a techie guy. It has been proclaimed DEAD. I'm going to miss all of that data that I can't recover.

Yet another Maxtor bites the dust. I've had and seen nothing but trouble from those drives. I would avoid using them in the future.

No, it was the Seagate that randomly crashed. The 300 GB Maxtor is running smoothly.

That's the worst thing you can do after having a harddisk problem. Always do some kind of surface check on the disk (the vendor diagnostic tools do that) before continue work with the drive.