Access granted

I have internet! As usual, NTL fucked it up again and not one but two different attempts to register the cable modem failed, because they hadn't marked my account as fully opened yet. 2 expensive phone calls to outsourced call centres in India later, and I finally got it going.

Now, I have about 15 pages of Livejournal to check, a couple of LJ posts to make, 10 MySpace friend requests to consider, over 900 emails to download (mostly spam), a couple of web forums to moderate, and then I'll be up to date. Probably some time in mid-November, then.

hard disk lost to oblivion... almost

Earlier, I was playing that damned Oblivion game, and had been for about 4 hours. Having closed the first gate to Oblivion and being ready to embark on rescuing the Count of Kvatch, I hit the quicksave button, and the game froze up - mouse was dead, sound card was looping 50ms of audio. Fair enough, I thought, the developers always were known for having games with bugs in. So, I hit reset on the computer, and waited. I was greeted with the following:

Boot from CD:

Non system disk. Replace disk and press Enter

Anybody who's ever had a catastrophic computer failure will recognise some variation on the "Non-system disk" error, that forboding white on black message 10 seconds after startup that is far worse news than any blue screen of death. I had one in 2000 which I remember quite clearly, and I think there's been another since then. These days, I at least have a cd-writer and take backups, though it occurred to me that I'd not made one for a few months - stupid. I took out the cd to confirm that it wasn't just some sort of boot order problem where it was looking for the cd first and giving up if it couldn't find it, but no. It wasn't recognising my hard disk whatsoever. Had Oblivion managed to overwrite my hard disk's partition table or something, as had happened in 2000? (That was when I was playing Bejeweled online, strangely enough. I've not played it since.)

I turned the computer off, and turned my old one on, in the hope that I could connect my installed-minutes-previously broadband to that and at least get online to ask someone for advice. Sadly, as usual and as expected, NTL had fucked up the account so getting this up and running was taking far longer than hoped for. In the meantime, I thought I may as well try the new one again.

I took a screwdriver to it and opened it up, and checked the hard disk was still connected correctly. One of the connectors felt a little loose but refused to go on any more snugly when I pushed it. The inside of the case was warm, but nothing too out of the ordinary, I thought. Anyway, I turned on the new PC in the hope that despite the odds, it was somehow a transient problem - and it worked. It found the disk and booted into Windows XP as usual, and has stayed that way up to now. I took advantage of this fortunate opportunity to break out the cd-burning software and back up my emails, bookmarks, logfiles, photos, and the last 3 tracks I've been working on for my so-called 'band'.

I think this was something to do with overheating, as it's quite a warm day, and Oblivion is quite resource hungry, so it wouldn't surprise me if the computer had got too hot. But for the disk to not be recognised at start-up? That's bizarre. Has anybody else ever had anything similar? Or any practical advice of any nature?